Last year when I published a series of posts on what I expect from iOS 5, there were serious issues I had with the iPhone experience. Most of them were answered. Except of course the notifications overhaul wasn’t quite up to the mark, battery low indicator or no WiFi network / Data network pop-ups still haunt us. However largely my expectations from iOS 5 last year were met. What it doesn’t change is of course the fact that, for me to call the iPhone a mobile computer a major change is required. That’s something that no mobile OS has delivered so far and I won’t be surprised if Apple is the first one to do it.
Get the phone out of the smartphone. I no longer want my phone to be a mobile computer, I want my mobile computer to also double up as a phone. Simple. Yet not so simple. Allow me to explain.
Ever since the first iPhone came out in 2007, the mobile industry is redefined. The expectation that a mobile phone would be a computer is real than ever before and in many ways we are there. But that piece of glass that I carry in my pocket is still fundamentally designed to be a phone. I am typing an important message and someone calls, my flow is interrupted. I am replying to an urgent email and before I click send, a call comes in, my flow is interrupted. I am tweeting out something and a call comes in, my flow is broken again. It keeps on happening, worst when I am playing temple run with over a million on the score card. Why should my mobile computer just stop me from doing everything and alert me about an incoming call? And that’s a screen I cannot minimize, I cannot avoid and every time it comes up, I am stranded, sidelined.
I hope with iOS 6, the iPhone is seen as a mobile computer. The phone is important, but the i for intelligence needs to improve.