So I’ve had my iPhone for about six weeks now. For a revision A product coming from a company that has never mass produced a mobile phone the result is beyond outstanding. You’ll hear many complain about it’s supposed drawbacks such as lack of 3G, it doesn’t work on my provider of choice, I can’t use it with my companies mail server, it doesn’t take video clips, its storage capacity is lacking, it doesn’t support native third party applications, blah blah, etc. This is Apple people. You can’t introduce a product and expect it to have all the feature set you’d like right from the get go. Apple is extremely intelligent in its approach. Make a fantastic product for a large enough group to get an idea of it’s success before going all out. Case in point: the iTunes Music Store. When it was introduced it had a mediocre music library. As time progressed and it matured, it’s catalog increased exponentially. Similarly the iPhone will mature steadily as well. I have no doubts that future carriers will start to carry the iPhone eventually. Once exclusivity agreements end, and back-end infrastructure changes are made, it will happen. Don’t forget the uniqueness of the iPhones online activation and visual voice mail feature. Carriers need to change their inner workings to support this. Having said all this, there are I believe, three core features that are gaping wide holes in what should have been included in the iPhone on its day one release.

1. Multiple SMS recipients. Are you serious? Most any modern phone has the ability to send an SMS message to more than one person. This among the three is by far the most obvious missing feature.
2. MMS Messaging. If you are selling a phone with a built in camera, it should most definitely allow you to send picture messages. This I can understand perhaps posing some technical requirements that just weren’t ready from launch day but should have most definitely been supported after the first firmware update.
3. Song lyrics. Apple claims the iPhone is also the best iPod they’ve ever made. I would tend to agree. But how can you make that statement yet miss features that the iPod has had for some time now? There is absolutely no technical reason whatsoever that I shouldn’t be able to read the lyrics I’ve embedded in my music library.

Apple, you sorely need to remedy the above three points, as it’s starting to get quite embarrassing when people learn that my fancy new iPhone can’t perform the same basic functionality that the phone they got for free, can.