iPhone OS 3.0: What Didn’t We Get? Video! Push Gmail! Flash! Improved Notifications! Background Multitasking! Palm Pre Features! More
While at times it felt like a tidal wave of features were announced today during Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Preview Event, several features were still conspicuous by their absence. Here’s what comes immediately to mind… after the break!
Mobile iChat: It will break Chad’s heart, but Apple still hasn’t put those Mobile iChat patents to use. Are they waiting on new hardware (with a front facing video-chat camera, perhaps?)
Unified messenger: I asked for this a long time ago, and Palm answered it with the Pre. Apple could certainly give us the perfect UI for something that combines mail, SMS, Twitter, IM, and other social/communications status and messages into a single feed. But will they?
Unified Email Inbox: Some people hate them, some people love them, but it takes a lot of clicks to switch between multi-account email inboxes on the iPhone right now, and to have even the option of a unified view would be good news to a good many users.
Push Gmail:: Admittedly, Gmail’s IMAP implementation is so… eccentric… we worry what they’d do with IDLE, but the Android G1 has push Gmail, so we know it’s possible. Google Synch has already licensed ActiveSync, which the iPhone uses as well, and while corporate users on Exchange would be locked out, we’d take what we can get at this point. Google, where is it?
Premium App Store: We heard rumors of a premium App Store Plus, but nothing mentioned so far. Plenty of news with turn-by-turn, subscriptions, and in-app purchases for the store, but nothing to separate out +$20 apps.
Cloud contact integration: Another from the Palm Pre gameplan, Apple made no mention of pulling contacts from other clouds, like Google and Facebook, and of seamlessly merging and managing them on device. Maybe we’ll see a MobileMe 2.0 pick this up at WWDC?
Background multitasking: It was rumored as well, but Scott Forstall said tests of Windows Mobile and Android showed 80% battery drain with a single background IM client running (though we’re sure our friends on WMExperts, Android Central, and PreCentral.net would beg to differ on that…) so Apple stuck to Push Notification instead. That doesn’t solve the problem of streaming internet radio, however, so is Apple again waiting on more RAM in better hardware come WWDC?
Improved notification system: Both Android and Pre, in addition to multitasking, have superior notification systems. With Apple’s new Push service, we really needed this in the iPhone as well. As we mentioned in the article, what if 30 apps push 10 model message dialogs all at once? How does the iPhone — or more importantly, the user — decide which to handle and which to ignore?
Video recording: Kevin Rose nailed cut and paste, and also the lack of video recording. He said it was due to hardware limitations on the built in NAND Flash RAM inside the iPhone. We’re not sure what he meant, or what his source(s) told him, but the iPhone of course lacks SDHC card support, so you can’t swap out your storage. Flash memory also has finite write cycles — every time you change a bit, it decays the barrier between bits, meaning eventually it fails and you can’t write to it any more. Is Apple afraid users will shoot so much video, and write to the built-in memory so much, it will fail and won’t be replaceable? If so, maybe yet again we’re waiting on newer hardware…
Adobe Flash: Still no love, not even video player plugin support for Adobe’s Flash, Flash Mobile, Flash Lite, or Open Screen project. With the speed in which Apple is adopting HTML 5, CSS, 2D/3D animation and transform, we’re guessing they’ll just never be that in to Flash…
Theming: No custom home screen backgrounds, icon sets, etc. — hey, Apple has to leave you with some reason to Jailbreak, right?
Hexagonal grids: Heh, we’ll leave that for Windows Mobile 7…
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Still no ToDos with Calendar. Not that I care much, but it really surprises me that it’s not a priority of Apple’s — especially with all of the klunky third party versions.
So are we only getting an update this summer? No hardware/new iphone?
all this only means i will still jailbreak
really would like to see customized ringtones i hate getting a sms and see 5 people reach for the pocket at the dr’s office lol.
andrew…ditto.
Adding the list of things that we are getting and the list of the missing together and it still doesn’t equal the number 100 which was thrown out as the number of improvements. Since they didn’t have time or the inclination to do all 100 it doesn’t mean that they won’t deliver some of these. However, they have to leave something big out because if we’re getting cut & paste we need something else to complain about.
Thank goodness there is no flash, thank goodness no push. I don’t want the bloat, security nightmares, nor pushed adverts.
I’m pretty happy, but will have to see what the new hardware is that we’re all expecting in June. I’m still on a 1st get iPhone, but I don’t want to be in July.
Coming from a g1, running things in the background is not always the best idea. My horrid battery life and only 5 day standby is a testament to that
Really was hoping for to dos that sync w/iCal and better notifications w/the to dos and calendar events. One big reason I got the phone was to get more organized and having my calendar at my fingertips with “one & done” notifications only gets me partway there.
so this may be a stupid question – but whats the difference between push gmail and what we have now when you put your gmail account in the native iphone email app?
that pushes does it not?
Yes, we still live in the land of jailbreak. sigh But was it just me, or is jailbreak still the 500 pound gorilla in the corner Apple never acknowledges? I wonder what hurdles they will throw up in the face of JB and JB developers this time.
I also wonder how many JB apps /might/ be able to make the transition to non-JB with the newly available APIs…
@Wisco: No, Gmail does not wake up your phone and tell it there is mail waiting. The mail sits there on Gmail’s servers until your phone checks for mail, (every 15 minutes at most).
To PUSH mail requires a continuous connection, which is “signaled” when mail arrives. This is like the push mail available with Outlook, or MobileMe, where you know you got mail the instant it arrives at your mail-server.
Google does this for contacts and Calendars, but not mail yet. They require nothing from Apple to turn this capability on, so I’m a little mystified why everyone was waiting for Apple to do something about it. Its not Apple’s problem.
@icebike
Thanks for the explanation.
Yeah, I didnt understand what people were waiting on Apple to do on this – maybe with the new notifications for apps, google can release a gmail app using the functionality
So, I guess you didn’t notice how the push service will work with all kinds of data, one example given that it will pre-load youtube videos.
Also, Meebo is going to be a native app now. Not a webapp. A NATIVE app. Personally, I’ll take that over ichat any day.
Finally, there is still a LOT more to come. They said they have more features, and I’m sure they have more features coming.
The cut and paste is awesome but they had an oversight: clipboard. That way multiple things can copied and then pasted. I hope they catch this quick and intergrate it. Others wise you’ll only be able to copy one thing at a time.
Mobile iChat, Unified Email Inbox and Gmail push are heartbreaks for me. I’m a big fan of Gmail ! I also love emailing. Mobile iChat would of been great too. Maybe they did not add it / wont ever will add it because there are paid apps for sale and they did not want to be unfair and cut those sale from devs.
It’s not so much that I want a unified inbox, more an easier way to swap between accounts, or at least get to the account select menu without having to hammer back 1000 times. I keep finding myself pressing the close button, only to find the app opens itself back to where you were rather than the account select screen. Luckily it’s not a major issue, just kind of fiddly.
I think a majority of the current features are a long time coming, and I’m glad they are finally here.
A little concerned about the push notifications, I hope apps all come with a way to decide if you just want a badge or full text alerts, because if you have a bunch of clients spamming text updates clicking “close” on them all is going to be a pain, the badge and a noise is fine really.
NO Flash !!! No Good!!!!!
Flash IS important. So many creative sites rely on that technology.
The argument for/against flash is more to do with the type of sites you surf. You don’t want flash because of it sucking up your power?? Fine! Just turn it off/on in the preferences. I along with my other developer friends won’t be joining the iphone craze till this is rectified.
Looks like I’m going back to the blackberry. iPhone is a nice toy, but I can’t do business like this anymore. No tasks sync to exchange, no learning dictionary, freezing keyboard, crap push. I’ll be taking a look at the pre as well. I presume 10.6 OS exchange will leave out tasks and many other features as well.. Leaving MAC a joke for business users again. Don’t you dare mention Entourage. Love my iPhone and MACOS, but they keep ignoring business users! Jobs! I can promise you there are more business users than movie makers!! We need tasks, notes.. Dictionary that learns and that we can adjust. We need access and the ability to sync files from our desktop..
You idiots ( apple ) Still no FLASH, morons, how many times have a I needed to view a site whilst away from my main computer and have not been able to. Just in Palm springs and needed to rent a car ( online ) and couldn’t. That’s just one of many incidents. I love my I phone but unless this gets changed and quick, I would switch to something that does flash and other business type applications better. For all the great features it has and how innovative it is, why did they screw that up so badly !!
Omg… Still no Flash player support!!! I agree that leaving this out will be a HUGE disappointment given that many of my daily visited sites use Flash. What a bummer if this remains true. Why have 3G iPhone if half my web activity ties me to my laptop PC or MacBook with a 3G wireless card to really be mobile anyway. Come on Apple, we love ya but quit being such bigots & give us the Flash support we need.
Hmm… No flash is a bummer, surely they gotta sort it out soon, I’m new to the iPhone so still excited by the other fancy things, flash would be kool though. Looking forward to see how this turn by turn gps works out if it does, surely garmin or someone are all over that by now
To andrew and anybody else wanting to make their itunes songs into ringtones for free just shoot me an email at mikejordan17@yahoo.com and ill send you detailed instructions. No need to pay apple $.99 for a ringer u can do yourself
You CAN get push gmail. Just add a microsoft exchange account and fill in the blanks. For server use m.google.com. Leave domain blank and turn on ssl.
and if you already have an exchange server for something else then sign up for a yahoo mail account and forward all your gmail to it. It “pushes” flawlessly.
Flash is a very big part of the internet, How can Apple not see this. As website designer, myself and many other designers use flash for navigation as well. Flash is not just used for advertisement, many sites on the web depend on Flash for functionality.
Didn’t get background multi-task because a) there is no need, b) its a security thing (viruses rely on background multi-tasking to work).
Didn’t get everything else because why give us everything? drip feed and we’ll keep buying….
one thing i HATE about 3.0 is mms…why they bowed down to the whinging numpties who think this is actually a “feature” when you’ve got email that does the job better at less cost is beyond me.
Backgrounding is one of the best functions ever. On a jailbroken phone you can be running pandora while surfind the web/sms/IM or whatever else. You can run PDAnet in the background while playing music over your phone or doing anything else. The background only works with what you turn on to work with its not automatic for the jailbroken phones. Its completely silly to say that its not needed, I have used it many times. Also flash would be great, as its just so essential online in many ways we don’t even really pay attention to anymore. Push gmail would be great to, I do the gmail->yahoo push but its still sort of a pain when you are in the yahoo too long and it downloads your gmail and then you just have more of the same messages. Also notifications would be great, its nice to check from the lock screen that I have an email or IM, but I jailbreak for that.
My company (NuevaSync) offers push GMail sync service for the iPhone that works with its built in Exchange sync client. Our service works with any IMAP mail server, not just GMail.
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