There's an interesting trend going on here where I feel like a higher-than-usual % of new iPhone users are former BlackBerry users. This coincides with the recent failures of BlackBerry, and the fact that a lot of people got on 2-year contracts to get 9700's, which I feel like was the last solid device they made that wasn't GLARINGLY behind the times (though it was still not a full-featured smartphone).
So now what's happening is that the iPhone users are suggesting a lot of things that they could do on their BlackBerry as "fixes" for iOS 5.1. Which is not to say that they don't love their iPhone - I LOVE my 4s worlds beyond how I loved my BlackBerry. But there's just a list of things that my wife and I wish that the iPhone could do, or that Apple would LET you do:
- Sound Profiles (This one kills my wife. She wants to be able to kill some sounds, but not others. But all you can really do on iPhone is use the silent switch, which turns everything to off/vibrate. The plus side of this is that the mute switch is VERY convenient)
- iMessage doesn't work right (This is my biggest gripe. If you can't fix it so that messages are more reliable, at least give us a way to know that the message has been RECEIVED or VIEWED by the recipient. If the app can tell us when someone is typing, it should be able to tell us this)
- Bluetooth/Radio Switches on Home Screen (Really? We shouldn't need a jailbreak to do this. I feel like at least half of the people who complain about the 4s's battery life are people who don't manage their power usage correctly, but Apple makes it pretty inconvenient to turn off features you don't want to be using)
- Email: Mark Unread/Delete for ALL messages (Really, really? The number of unread emails in my badges hovers between 20 and 60 all day because there's no way I can keep up with junk mail across 2 email accounts. I understand that iOS 5 made it a new feature where you can "Edit" and check a bunch off, but they should've gone another step and allowed you to do all of them at once).
- One-touch empty App Task Bar/History list (Okay, so this isn't really relevant because people mistakenly believe that the app slider bar shows all the apps that are OPEN. It doesn't. It's more like an app history, as the OS automatically suspends apps after a short period of time, such that they use no data or battery. But for those of us who are OCD and still like to keep that slider empty, we shouldn't have to press the screen 40 times to close them all down. More of an annoyance than a real issue).
- SIRI. (I put this last because Siri needs major work. It's a wonderful idea, decent for marketing the phone, and occasionally it can be cute and useful. But the voice recognition is pretty bad and the only things I really WANT to use it for (namely, changing settings on the phone) apparently weren't even contemplated by Apple. Not going to happen in 5.1, but just putting that out there.)