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Twenty features the next iPhone software revision needs:

1. MobileiChat app. It doesn’t need to do VoIP, but should speak AIM and Jabber. That is literally the one thing I miss about my 1.0.2 hacked iPhone.

2. MobileRSS app — although now that Google Reader has a pretty snappy iPhone friendly mobile version, maybe this is somewhat moot. An online/offline RSS reader would be such a great fit for the iPhone, and Apple needs to step up their RSS offerings considerably. The crappy web implementation (that apes the crappy DesktopSafari implementation) totally doesn’t cut it.

3. The iPhone needs a Calendar that can subscribe to online .ics files directly. It’s ridiculous that I need to keep iCal running and sync my iPhone periodically to keep my appointments intact. What is this, PALM DESKTOP (zing!)?

4. Photos should be able to be put in albums directly on the phone, and deleting photos should be a faster, batch enabled process. It takes about five tries to get a good picture of a moving object, and deleting those four failed shots is a laborious chore.

5. Camera: It might be nice if there was an option to map the shutter click to a hardware button — “volume up”, for example. The software button is hard to deal with, and the whole “picture is taken when you let up on the trigger button” is odd.

6. YouTube Bookmarks should sync with a user’s online YouTube Favorites list.

7. Stocks should have the ability to enter a rudimentary portfolio ala Google Finance. I need to know how much money I’m losing on my sh*tty Sony stock on a daily basis.

8. Maps is so good! but cruelly missing actual GPS functionality. Even if this functionality could be faked using cell phone tower signals, it would be worth it. Present in 1.1.3 update!

9. It might be nifty if the Clock could have a pop-up menu for programmable, preset countdown timers, like 9 minutes for “Pasta” or 60 minutes for “Lunch break”. But otherwise, it’s done.

10. Some of my nerdier friends lament the lack of an “Advanced” mode in Calculator, and certainly unit and measurement conversions might be handy, but I actually kind of like the simplicity of the existing Calculator app. So leave that alone and add an “Advanced” tab.

11. Notes: so lame. If this could sync to a wik or set of pages online like 37 Signal’s “Ta-Da” lists or something, it might be worth it. I imagine this will get better in Leopard when it syncs to Mail.app, but even then, it won’t be very useful. They should just ditch it and write a Google Docs client. Then we’re talking.

12. Unless I’m missing something, Settings needs a “Clear all known networks” function in the Wi-fi panel to avoid the odd issue where you hook up to a open wifi network without a password and then encounter the same network with a password later. Commenters have pointed out that you can clear the network in the panel, but that tab is only available after you’ve logged in and joined the network. Right? Right? I might be way off here.UPDATE: I’m missing something. You can clear the network right from the iPhone network setting.

13. Mobile iTunes needs direct video download, OBVIOUSLY, but also it could use a tab listing the iTunes Store freebies of the week. That would hook people into and get people used to using it, I imagine.
14. Also, the ability to read the actual album reviews (and not just tease the user with the number of reviews) would be useful.

15. Mail needs a “Mark all as read” function for those of us still on POP3. Landscape mode would be nice if only for the larger input keyboard.

16. MobileSafari: Is it me or is there no way to open a window in a new “tab” (actually, “tab” doesn’t quite work here, actually, so I call them “cards” — it seems to me like the extra windows slide around in the background like cards in a magic trick). Pressing on a link pops up a cute notifier that tells you where the link goes — maybe multi-touching on that pop-up could open a new card?

17. Also: inline Flash 9 support, especially now that Flash is starting to support H.264 video. Cripes, if Nokia can do it, Apple can pull it off.

18. iPod: Contrary to what Apple says, the iPhone/iPod touch is notthe best iPod ever. I find CoverFlow to be essentially useless and I wish it would just go away. But worse than that, I’m annoyed by the fact that I can’t just drop media on the iPhone icon in iTunes to move it over. Instead I have to designate a playlist as my “iPhone” playlist, put the media there, and sync? And even then, I have to explicitly enable videos one at a time? This is all quite weird. I really liked it much better when I could just drop the media on the icon for my 5G iPod and be done with it.UPDATE: added in 1.1.3 update!
19. And: why can’t I subscribe to and download podcasts directly from the device? For that matter, why do I have to hook the iPhone up via USB at all? The new Zunes have some (but not all) of this “wireless syncing” stuff figured out. Apple needs to untether the iPhone from iTunes a little bit, or Microsoft’s third Zune revision might actually get off the bench and start scoring some points.

20. Finally: the iPhone should be able to provide internet to my laptop. Other phones can via bluetooth DUN profiles, so why not the iPhone? In fact, I’ll do you one better and suggest a very Apple-ish implementation: the iPhone should work as a mobile wi-fi hotspot and DHCP router, so not only my Mac laptop could get internet, but my girlfriend’s PC laptop could get also internet at the same time. Now that would be cool, and given the iPhone’s OS X underpinnings, not that hard to engineer at all.

~Jeff

(iPhone pic of Jon Klein’s iPhone)