What the iPad and iPhone still need to do better

Apple is likely to release the iPad 2 in April and an enhanced version of the iPhone 4 in July or August. It’s not like Apple to do a wholesale redesign just a year after a previous one, so expect the next iPhone to be an improved iPhone 4 — what I’m calling the iPhone 4x — rather than an iPhone 5, just as the iPhone 3G S followed the iPhone 3G. Although Apple made huge strides in iOS 4.x in the past year, it still has areas where it should improve.

Here are the top 10 sets of improvements Apple should be working on for 2011.

A desktop-capable browser If mobile devices are to supplant PCs for many tasks (I believe they will), they need to have browsers that can run the same apps as a desktop. Today, neither Apple’s Safari nor Google’s Chrome can make that claim. The iPad especially can succeed even more as a laptop replacement if its Safari could run the same Web apps as the Mac and Windows versions, such as Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. Given that HTML5 is essentially owned by Apple and Google, either company could give mobile devices parity with desktops. Regardless of Google’s actions, Apple should take the initiative.

Along these lines, I wish iOS would stop refreshing Web pages when come back to them after switching away. If the app has a form I’m filling out, I lose the data I entered (ironicially, I usually switch out to get a piece of requested information for that form). With its introduction, iOS 4.2 reduced the frequency of such refreshes, but it still happens too often. However Apple is deciding the duration for caching a Web page, it needs to be revisit that algorithm.

Multiple account support Mobile devices are typically used for both home and work purposes, yet an iOS device is essentially locked to a single iTunes account. That needs to change, so work assets can be managed by iTunes at the office and personal assets can be managed by iTunes at home. This should extend to family use at home as well: With products like Apple TV and iTunes supporting sharing of content across a family’s devices, there  has to be a better way to manage that federated group of users and assets.

Voice recognition and control One of the strengths of Google’s Android OS is its voice recognition capabilities for search and other uses. Voice as an interface makes a lot of sense for a mobile device, especially for smartphones, and Google does a better job of bringing that capability to its mobile platform. Yes, Apple’s iOS has its VoiceOver capability to help visually impaired owners of an iPhone or iPad, but it requires extreme concentration to use and is not suited for on-the-go access, such as when trying to place a call or look up an address via a Bluetooth headset.

Native navigation app Google also beats Apple when it comes to its built-in navigation capabilities. Yes, there are iOS apps for TomTom and other popular navigation tools, but they require clunky holders to work well. They’re also pretty expensive when you get all the pieces you need. Not so on Android — Apple has reportedly been hiring navigation experts, so this gap may be filled soon.

Media subscription support If you want to read your magazine on the iPad or iPhone, you usually have to buy it one issue at a time — even if you’re a print subscriber. As far as I can tell, this is more about a business dispute between Apple and publishers, but whatever the cause, it needs to be resolved. After all, the Economist’s iOS app lets print subscribers get their issues each week on their iPads and iPhones, so why not everyone else? The iPad epecially is a great reading device (outside of bright sunlight, anyhow), and what works well for books works even better for periodicals.

Better peripheral support The iPad makes a great laptop replacement, especially now that some really good apps for office productivity and specialty business needs are available. But it doesn’t fit well with business peripherals. Yes, you can use a Bluetooth keyboard, but the lack of shortcuts for, say, text formatting and app navigation mean you’re going back and forth between the keyboard and the touchscreen, which makes it hard to use in full sit-down mode. Worse, there’s no mouse support and no mirroring support, so you can’t use an external monitor or mouse with the iPad as you would with a laptop.

Maybe Apple’s afraid the iPad might cannibalize MacBook sales and would rather you get an iPad in addition to a MacBook. For now, that fear is misplaced. The iPad executes tasks that make no sense on a laptop, and a laptop can run apps that an iPad can’t aspire to today. Users will still want both, even if Apple allows the overlap in capabilities to grow (as it should).

Then there’s printing — iOS 4.2’s AirPrint feature has turned out to be a dud. Fewer than a dozen HP printers support it, and all of them are new, so using AirPrint means buying a printer you probably wouldn’t otherwise need to purchase. Allegedly, other printer makers will support AirPrint at some point, but for this feature to be truly useful, there has to be a way to AirPrint-enable the wireless and network printers already in homes and offices. The hacks that let you route print jobs through your Mac or PC aren’t good options — you shouldn’t require an active PC to print to a network printer. You can try some third-party printing apps, but printing should be an OS-level feature.

More capable iCal and Mail apps iCal has never worked quite right with invitations. iOS 4.2.1 went a long way to addressing a glaring problem: the inability to choose which calendar to place an accepted invitation. I speak for myself, but I don’t want my personal business on my company’s Exchange calendar. However, I want to see both calendars in one view, as iCal allows.

But the feature doesn’t always work. Not all .ics invite files are recognized, especially those that don’t come through an Exchange account, and you don’t always get the choice of which calendar to add the appointment to. Sometimes in iCal, accepting an appointment doesn’t add it to the calendar.

I’d also like to see the calendar support recurring events beyond daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, and yearly. For example, I should be able to set an event to recur the first of each month or every 10 days. Corporate calendars such as Microsoft Exchange, Novell GoupWise, and IBM Lotus Notes can do that on the desktop, but iOs scrambles those same invitations. Even the old Palm OS could handle such recurring events.

Also, it would be great if Mail had an option to group emails by date, like Mac OS X’s Mail does. Yes, I know you can sort by date, but those labels of Today, Yesterday, Wednesday, and so on are really helpful to navigate emails, and iOS would benefit from that — especially for those whose iPads and iPhones are essentially their primary means of accessing email.

Mail also needs to support mail handling rules. Ideally, you could import them from your desktop mail client, as well as add and modify them on your iOS device. Mail handling would help deal with the spam that more frequently clogs up Mail’s inbox. It would also let you filter by project and person — a strategy that many email-intensive users rely on to keep their work communications in check.

Finally, Mail needs to support groups. Today, you can’t send email to a group; instead, you have to open the group and add its members one by one to the mail To, Cc, or Bcc field. That’s really dumb.

Support for fonts in e-books The iBook app’s version 1.1 update, which came with iOS 4, ignores most font specifications in e-books. That may prevent publishers from overriding a reader’s font preferences, but it causes issues for technical books, such as those containing code. Basically, Apple went too far. E-books are glorified Web pages, with the book text a set of HTML files packaged with a CSS file and the embedded images. The CSS lets you assign fonts as part of your class definitions — just as for the Web. But iBook ignores most of these fonts assignment. For <h1>, <h2>, etc. paragraph style definitions, it will honor serif and sans-serif attributes in style definitions, but not for other style types. And it ignores monofont attributes most of the time as well (I can’t figure out what causes it to honor them, but occasionally they do display in the e-books I’ve produced). So, for example, if you want have code snippets in a monospace font such as Courier New, too bad. That omission can make it hard to read code in text. And forget about embedding symbol fonts to handle special characters such as the Mac’s Command key, engineering symbols, or the icons for iOS’s common controls. In iBook 1.0, such local fonts were honored, and they work just fine in other e-book readers. So this is an easy fix.

Note that the font issue it’s not just an issue for book publishers selling through the iBookstore: iBook lets you add your own e-books to its library via iTunes, so businesses can make their own manuals and so on accessible to iPad and iPhone users and customers.

Preference for default file type assignments In iOS, you’ll find a nifty feature that lets you tap and hold a file icon to select which app to open it in. This capability not only lets you open attachments in emails but also share files across compatible apps. Right now, there’s no way to set what the default app is to open a file type. There should be such an option in the Settings app.

Return of the Rotation Lock switch on the iPad A misguided update in iOS 4.2 was to change the Screen Lock physical switch to the Mute Alarms switch (to match the iPhone’s switch usage). For many of us, having an easily reached switch to stop the screen from rotating as we use the iPad in odd angles is more valuable than turning off the alerts for new mail and the like. The on-screen control for screen rotation lock is fairly buried and not a great substitute. I get that for some people, the alerts switch is more important. However, I’d prefer that Apple let the users decide and make this switch’s function an option in the Settings app. (The rumors around the forthcoming iOS 4.3 suggest that is exactly what Apple will do — if so, great news!)

This article, “What the iPad and iPhone still need to do better,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.