I often wonder, what if Apple actually decided to bend a little and given in to the pressure that it is always under. While the iPhone 3GS is undoubtedly a great device, there are millions of Nokia users out there who keep away from the Apple Gizmo for lack of certain essential features. So lets imagine that the iPhone was manufactured by HTC or say Nokia, here are the things we would have seen:
- Memory card slot: 16GB internal memory is great, but hot swap MicroSD cards can be a great convenience. Amongst many uses personally If I could plug out the MicroSD from my digicam and use it straight on the iPhone…
- Charging: On any business trip one thing I can’t dare to forget it my iPhone power adapter. It’s so hard to find someone with the same. A Nokia would have ensured that I would find a power charger almost in any part of the world.
- Syncing: Though some love iTunes syncing. I absolutely hate it. Countless times I have ended up losing my contacts and sms messages. I still have over 1000 contacts and 4000 sms messages using a Nokia E Series (even though I have changed 3 handsets in the E Series).
- USB Mass Storage: 16GB of internal memory, and we cant even use the same as a portable HDD? #fail
- Bluetooth File Trf: P2P games over bluetooth and AD2P is cool. But its at times frustrating that we cannot exchange files (specially songs).
- Ringtones: As much as I love the business sense of Apple to charge for ringtunes, I would love to have that open. The Nokia AD about openness makes so much sense.
- Camera Flash: Apple has a great camera lens on the iPhone 3G aswell as the 3GS. Wonder what stops them from giving away a flash light?
Update: And how could we forget
- Multitasking: This is one feature where close competitors such as the Palm pre score so well. But leaving the competition aside lack of multitasking can be a real pain at times.
- Removable Battery: An age old complaint with iPods and iPhones. Apple just won’t agree to add a removable battery.
Many more features that I would love to have are full filled by third party apps such as the Sms helper which shows the sms message size when I am composing.
On the other hand, I am happy that Apple made the iPhone. It has blessed us with a super fast OS X Mobile (rather spared us the horror of using WM or Symbian), amazing apps and games, iTunes, unmatched web integration etc!