The IPhone OS 4.0 Wishlist

We've delved into iPhone OS 3.0 and so far, we like what we've seen. But after playing with it all day, we noted a few new features that should be thrown in for the next update as well as a few existing apps that desperately need a makeover.

By Nick Mediati and Ginny Mies

Wed, June 17, 2009PC World We've delved into iPhone OS 3.0 and so far, we like what we've seen. But after playing with it all day, we noted a few new features that should be thrown in for the next update as well as a few existing apps that desperately need a makeover.

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Notes App Needs a Facelift The iPhone's Notes app finally syncs with your computer in iPhone OS 3.0, but it's still very bare-bones. Give us the ability to change the font and the background color, at least.

Share with me! Being able to share your photos via email or MobileMe is well and good, but we'd love to see Apple bring other photo sharing outlets into the fold for iPhone 3.0. Bringing Flickr into the fold would be great; bonus points for adding in support for Facebook and Twitter-friendly image-sharing sites like Twitpic.

Photoediting at Your Fingertips With the iPhone 3G S's beefed up camera, iPhone 4.0 should deliver some basic photo editing software. And we'd love to see it utilize the iPhone's multitouch capabilities: Pinch to select, hit a button to crop, and swipe to undo.

Multitasking > Push Notifications We loved the Palm Pre's breezy card visualization of handling multiple open applications without it being a drain on performance or battery life (Apple's reasoning for not adding it). While iPhone 3.0's notifications are a step in the right direction, it just isn't the same as true background processing.

Spotlight Needs to Shine on the Web, Too iPhone 3.0's Spotlight is a great feature for finding apps and contacts quickly, but why shouldn't search expand to the Web, as well? The Palm Pre does this with their Universal Search feature, which allows you to search via Google, Google Maps, Twitter and Wikipedia if your query isn't found natively. We'd like to see something similar in 4.0.

Wallpaper on the Homescreen That adorable picture you snapped of your dog tearing up the neighbor's flowerbed only shows up briefly on the slide to unlock screen or when you're on hold with tech support--and then you're stuck with a boring black background. We'd like to enjoy our wallpaper a bit longer than that.

Bring Unity to the Inbox There's a pretty good chance you have more than one email address. There's also a pretty good chance that you use more than one email address with your iPhone. The problem is that as of right now, you have to check each email addresses inbox separately on the iPhone. Why not include a unified inbox where you can check all your email all at once?

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