iPhone OS 3.0 Quibbles

The announcement a few days ago that the iPhone OS 3.0 will be previewed in the coming week generated quite a bit of buzz among tech news sites. With all sorts of excitement and nothing to really talk about, it seems like the conversations on these matters inevitably turn into "Comment on what you think it will be" type of affairs. Interested in what others think might be on the horizon for next weeks preview I took a look at some of those comments and what did I see....

"Cut and Paste, please?"
"come on MMS and copy/paste..."
"unless this adds copy and paste, mms etc this is going..."


Really? That's what people are looking for? MMS...and copy & paste...really.
MMS just seems like a huge waste to me, if you though texting was a ripoff, you haven't seen MMS charges. Furthermore, why not just email? iPhones can open email attachments, particularly images. I'm not quite sure what people find so incredibly attractive about this, but perhaps that just me.
The title of this post is iPhone OS 3.0 Quibbles, emphasis on quibbles, because that is exactly what copy and paste is. I have tried my hardest to think of cases where I would have used copy & paste, and I would have to say that the number of instances of that occurring is less than a handful. In particular I remember one time when someone sent me an email which contained their phone #, unfortunately the iPhone did not recognize that it was in fact a phone number (it does, but that feature is somewhat spotty) and didn't provide the option of clicking on a link to dial it. So I had to remember a phone number for a whole three seconds while I entered it into the phone, no biggie. I have a sneaking suspicion that the people who are really excited about copy & paste are frequently typing "OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!". If that is the case, then please no copy & paste, there is plenty of that already.

So the natural question to then ask is, if these features are blaze, which ones should I be hoping for/expecting? Landscape keyboard is a popular choice, I don't think you can really argue against this, who knows why it isn't done yet.
Ultimately, one of the most important features that people don't mention enough is lovingly known as Push. It was supposed to launch in September 2008 (Apples words not mine), and yet there has been hardly a peep about this. No mention of it, no explanation, nothing. This is somewhat unfortunate since the addition of Push is likely one of the biggest changes we will see in the iPhone. The classic example is apps like AIM which could actually use push to notify users of new messages without having to open the app itself. AOL has gotten so impatient that they chose to hack their way around this by offering to send users texts when they receive a new message, also allowing them to remain logged into AIM for up to 24 hours after then exit the app. Email is obviously another no-brainer. No reason to waste battery life polling every X minutes, push is clearly the right way to do it.
There are tons of other apps out there which could use Push to improve user experience. How about RSS feed readers? Sports scores? I would mind being notified every time the Lakers were playing. I'm sure twitter'ers wouldn't mind being notified upon getting tweeted to (that cant be right).

So while people continue to hope for the improvements on the minor quibbles they have, I'm holding out for the big improvements which can change the game.