I want the iPhone to be able to allow news editors to keep their top reporters out in the field where they can do a lot of work without having to first crack open a laptop.
It is so close to being a killer app for field communications that all Apple needs to do is, um, hear this bit of free consulting.
Make Google map app play nice and SHARE data
e.g. I have the Google map app open and I pull up or search out an address for a home or business.
I query and get directions to the location but now want to SMS this info to a colleague or send the the turn-by-turns to another person by e-mail.
I should be able to do this - but I can’t.
– This kind of base level data pushing functionality - allowing the native apps to push to each other is critical to stay ahead of. But wait - I also want to push data to my blog(s) as well.
Let me send contact info as a ‘business card’ to another person.
Again having a native app like the Address book push data through the SMS pipe or Mail app pipe is a practical extension of this thinking.
e.g. I was at a conference in Cairo Egypt last Sunday with my iPhone and wanted to trade e-contacts easily. It is common for mobile telcos overseas to make it easy to zap a business card to someone via SMS. iPhone should do this out of the box.
Make the camera do some work
Make better use of the camera. Why not let me take a photo of someone’s business card and have OCR software convert it into a contact record?
Let me blog from my phone
Give me a basic blog-writing app - integrate it with camera, mail and text input interface.
In ‘Settings’ I would add my blog url address (XML-RPC.php) and set it up to post to the blog using user name and password.
Let me add multiple blogs just like you let me add mutiple IMAP e-mail accounts and I will be in blog-heaven.
C’mon Apple, this a no-brainer! I could get probably convince a lot of editors to buy these units for reporters if you gave us journalists that type of sweet communication integration.
What are you iPhone ‘bug’ reports?
u just asked the exact questions i did! Also a ms exchange contact,mail and calender! This would be amazing!
/A
I love the iPhone, but I find it to be a consumer-oriented device, not a producer. It’s meant for consuming Web pages, videos, music… not so much for being a mobile journalist, although I have blogged with it. It would be great if somebody designed a device that worked so smoothly for the journalist, doing many of the things you mention, and more. But seeing how videographers struggle with conversions, compressions, formats, etc., I worry that I would be spending most of my time trying to get the MoJo Q32i to sync with the awkard combination of third-party software I’d have to download.
There’s a market there, for someone who’s interested…