Though I agree with you. I think that Google will be happy. Their disruptive introduction of Android is opening up the whole market, so their apps will have more freedom on iPhones, as well as Android phones. That just means more advertising revenues for them.

Apple forced carriers to be more open than they had been. Now Android is forcing Apple to be more open then they had been. The ratchet effect of competition is working in the right direction.

Consumers: a big win for competition. I love to watch ATT/Apple square off against all comers. Both sides must keep getting better, or lose ground. These are awesome times.

The iPhone 3GS has a nice processor, so we may have better luck now, but then the quality of data on the At&T network has only degraded so we may not be so lucky.

Firstly (and most importantly) CallerID. I simply won’t accept a call where the CallerID is not presented. As a number of friends start to use Skype more and more, the number of calls presenting with a CLI of is increasing. Not a good thing. This could be remedied by ‘spoofing’ the CallerID by Skype (subject to knowing and validating originator’s number) or assigning a Skype VOIP number to each user which is routed with the call (especially when it finally emerges from VOIP land to POTS world).

Secondly, I would prefer, where a call is initiating on Skype’s network that it would be answered by a Skype client on the iPhone (kinda gets around the above issue). That way I could identify callers by their Skype username and include their details in my contacts/address book. Ability to background Skype.app anyone?

Finally – a unified Contacts Manager is what is really the next step. And I suspect that Apple’s sweetheart deal with the operators is going to potentially blindside them to the impact of this. I love the SMS (Messages) app on the iPhone. But why doesn’t a contact view have a page to review ALL forms of contact in order (irrespective of type). By this I mean a log of Calls (In/Out), SMS/MMS (sent/received), Emails (sent/received), IMs (in the same fashion as SMS). All with a common ‘contact’ API that allows any iPhone app to register a Contact Record and link to a contact. For that matter why can’t I link a task to a contact? Or a Note? Or even a set of photos?

I’ve been more than tempted to write a Mac OS app which scans the (simple) sqlite db’s in the iPhone backup bundles and appends call logs, sms logs and email snippets to the bottom of the contact’s notes fields.

Why can’t I bring up a contact and see when I last phoned/emailed them? Or them me..

Enough of that. I love my iPhone. But it could be so much more.

Gerard Byrne