Ok iOS 5 isn't even out yet, but there are already lacking features that are making iOS look dated by now.
When the iPhone came out it was indeed 4 years ahead of any other phones, but that's not the case anymore, with Windows Phone 7 and Android doing great stuff, Apple's iOS is looking like it's lagging. In some things it's still ahead, specially in third party support, but on others, not so much.
Ok so what features are a must for the next big release? Now, keep in mind that this is my personal opinion and I'm pretty sure some of you (I'm looking at you fan boys) won't think this is stuff that's needed until almighty Apple says so.
Notification Center Widgets***
This is a must have, let developers do stuff for the notifications center, and let the users select what they want to have in there, a quick way to access brightness, favorite apps, and wifi settings (check out the concept video) is very necessary.
Fullscreen Safari*
This has been a feature for the jailbreak community that's been available for quite some time now, include it on iOS for crying out loud, pixels are way too important on the iPhone screen.
Sharing. Make iOS social.**
Share to anywhere, Facebook, Google+, whatever, allow developers to work this out. Twitter is a great start, but people share content in many sites now, and it's what I believe makes the Internet what it is. This could be a widget also, just merge it with everything, specially Safari.
Custom Ringtones and SMS tones*
By the time I'm writing this, iOS 5 beta 3 just came out, and this feature seems to have been included, but since Apple didn't make a huge deal out of this, I won't believe it until I see it on the final release. It's annoying that pretty so many people have Marimba and Tri-Tone as their default tones, and I'm guessing it's because pretty much every other included iOS tone sucks.
Status Bar Icons*
Having a notification screen and a popup are OK, but icons are also needed IMO. There's a chance it will look crowded, but since many just want notifications because of text messages, facebook, twitter and stuff, I think status bar icons would work well.
Other things
- Allow me to take action on notifications from the notifications center, stuff like reply to messages, look at what Google+ is doing, this is great, and it doesn't interrupt what I'm doing.**
- Contacts Photos*: show pictures on the contacts list, both phone and contacts app. At the very least, show pictures in the favorite contacts tab.
- Add option to kill ALL apps running*, I know they don't take as much resources as they do on say a Blackberry device or Windows, but you can tell they are taking some resources, let me close them all at once, and also let me choose which ones never to kill if I so choose, for instance, kill everything but even if I do, always leave Whatsapp running.
- Brightness on FastApp switcher*: There's volume there, why can't I have brightness there too? There IS enough room.
- Any orientation homescreen. It's kind of stupid to app switch when in landscape mode on the iPhone.*
* Already available with jailbreak
** Kind of available with jailbreak, but only for BiteSMS in case of messages and not so much for social sharing as I think it should be.
*** Looks like this is coming for the jailbreak community, but I haven't tested it myself.
Ok so that's my thoughts on what the next release should have, I'm positive some will agree with me, and I'm more than certain Apple will keep on "taking" ideas from the jailbreak community, but my point is that they should do it faster, releasing drops of features might not be the best way to go on the mobile market, which has, for many years, moved by trends.
I'm telling you Windows Phone Mango and the Galaxy II are the first things that make me think iOS could actually fall unless they keep the magic going, which iOS 5 isn't doing, not with features like "custom ringtones" which any 10-year old phone already has. Either Apple cuts the crap and lets users do whatever they want with their hardware, or they won't dominate the market forever, which I'm pretty sure is what they want.
My original post about this was a tweet that I decided to expand a little :)
