It hardly seems relevant to post yet another commentary on the iPhone, since there are so many raves, critiques, and in-depth reviews out there already. But having now had roughly two weeks to play with my own iPhone (mine arrived in the mail on July 13th), I want to go on record as saying that (a) I love the gadget, and (b) I’m so confident that the next iPhone — iPhone 2, or whatever Apple decides to call it — will be so much better that I’m already setting aside my spare nickels and dimes to pay for it.

Realistically, I don’t expect this to happen before the end of the year — and then only if Apple is desperate to introduce an updated gadget in time for the Christmas shopping season. I have to admit that I was a little startled with I googled the phase “iPhone 2″ and found a July 7th article entitled “Apple Announces Plans for iPhone 2“; but when I read, in the opening paragraph, that the new product “will only be available to consumers willing to have the hardware device soldered to their heads in a fashion similar to the La Forge character on the series ‘Star Trek, Next Generation,’” I realized that it might be so imminent after all. Indeed, I think it’s more likely that we’ll see iPhone 2 next spring, or perhaps somewhere around the first anniversary of the current product. All of this is pure speculation, of course; Steve Jobs doesn’t consult me about the timing of his new products (or anything else, for that matter).
And after yesterday’s news about the first software update for iPhone (see, for example “Rumors: iPhone Soft Update Soon, $350 Model for Hols,” from Wired, I realized that there may well far less pressure on Apple to introduce an improved hardware device, since many of the items on my own “wish list” are software features. Sure, I’d like to have a higher-resolution camera on my iPhone; and though it’s been a long, long time since I had to replace a batter on any cell phone I’ve owned (or carry a spare battery that I could swap in when my primary battery ran out of juice), I would like to have the option of a replaceable battery. And yes, the network could be faster — which requires, as I understand it, a different chipset. And no doubt there are some other hardware-oriented improvements that you can find in places like this podcast; but most of what I’d like today could be accomplished with software updates.

And we now have an “existence proof” that such updates are indeed possible; yesterday’s “iPhone 1.01″ update occurred almost exactly one month after the product was released on June 30th. For those of us accustomed to getting frequent software updates for our operating system and other desktop applications, this may not seem like a big deal; but when’s the last time you got a software update for any other cell phone you’ve owned? Admittedly, this first update was primarily concerned with patching security flaws in the Safari web browser (which is definitely a good thing, but doesn’t provide any new functionality), but the download/install process was just as simple and convenient as the download/update mechanism for one’s iPod — which makes sense, since it was driven by Apple’s iTunes software.

So here are some of the things I’m looking forward to, in the next few updates that Apple sends to us in the coming months:

• A way to save “draft” versions of an unfinished email message, just like we normally do with our desktop Mail program.
• A better way to search for entries in the “people” database. I’d like it to work just like the search mechanism for the “Address” book on a Mac desktop — so I can search on any field in a contact record.
• Speaking of search: I want to search for calendar entries, too.
• Preserving the colors that I’ve assigned to different sub-calendars in my iCal program, when I synchronize them with my iPhone. At the moment, all of the calendar entries are the same ugly gray color.
• A “week” view in the iPhone calendar.
• A mechanism for synchronizing “Notes” on the iPhone — primarily so that I can create notes more quickly and efficiently with the full-size keyboard on my desktop machine, and then synch them onto my iPhone
• A better spelling “predictor”. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m finding the “soft” keyboard to be very clumsy, and the iPhone software rarely, if ever, anticipates the full text of the word I’m typing.
• The ability to store to-do items in my calendar, just like I can with the desktop iCal program. (And while we’re at it, let’s get recurring to-do items in iCal, so I can drive myself crazy with weekly or monthly to-do items that I might otherwise forget.)

There’s probably more, but you get the idea: everything you can do in the standard Mac-desktop (or notebook) mail, iCal, and Address programs should be available, in a more-or-less equivalent form, on the iPhone; after all, it is running the Mac operating system, isn’t it?

Interestingly, my heavy usage of the iPhone during the past couple of weeks has also reminded me of the many ways in which my trusty old Palm Pilot Tungsten C is still a superior device. Some of it is admittedly detailed and picky — e.g., the notion of color-coded calendar entries, and to-do items incorporated into the calendar is pretty standard with the “DateBook” software on my Palm Pilot.  But that brings up a more fundamental point: one of the reasons I’ve traditionally been so happy with my Palm Pilot is that I haven’t been restricted to the software provided by Palm: I can download and install any of thousands of third-party programs. In addition to a third-party calendar program, I also use a third-party email program, a third-party web browser, a wonderful program (”Splash-ID”) for keeping a password-protected collection of all my credit-card numbers and various “identification numbers”, and another wonderful program called “WorldMate” that keeps updated airline travel schedules that I consult whenever my scheduled flight is canceled or delayed.

I want all of this on my iPhone, too; but I know that it’s likely to be a while before Apple “opens” the iPhone to third-party developers. For the next couple of months, I’d be very happy indeed if I could get the half-dozen software-based improvements listed above.

But I reall would like an iPhone 2 for Christmas. It’s almost enough to make me want to believe in Santa Claus…