The iPhone seriously lags other smartphones in areas other than market share. As a man armed with both an iPhone and a BlackBerry, I'm acutely aware of the iPhone's limitations, as well as the Blackberry's. The weaknesses of the Blackberry are well-known: lack of a great app store and all that entails, lack of a great browser, and (some may say) lack of multitouch. Despite that, I still use the BlackBerry, and it got me thinking: what does iPhone OS 4.0—which could be debuted as early as tomorrow (but likely not until spring, or even WWDC)—need to get me to finally make the iPhone my go-to device for both fun and business? And before you ask, we'll be ruminating on this for Android in another installment.

What follows is a list of the 12 most useful and, dare I say it, necessary features the next major update to iPhone OS should address. These are all features that are the same or similar to features that already exist in Windows Mobile, Android, and/or the Blackberry. And a quick disclaimer: the iPhone OS and its core apps are all treated under the rubric of iPhone OS 4.0.

Better notifications: sight, sound, customization

Apple is not a company known for offering users a lot of customization, but I think it's time for Apple to allow far more control over the iPhone's notifications features.

Splash screen improvements: We think it's just about crazy to not PIN-protect a smartphone. But when you do this with an iPhone, you put a big barrier between you and your notifications. We'd like to see (at a minimum) message count and SMS count indicators on the home screen. We shouldn't have to slide to unlock and enter a pin just to see how many new messages there are (or are not). Check out our simple mockup on the right. Surely this is doable. And of course Apple could tone it down and put indicators in the status bar up top rather than cover your precious wallpaper. Custom sound notifications: In its infinite wisdom, Apple lets you customize your ring tone, SMS tone, and if you want, (on/off) sound notifications for events like e-mail, voicemail, or calendar alerts. Give us more sounds—and the ability to customize the sounds for every alert type. It's annoying when nine people are in a meeting, a "ding" rings out, and seven people press their home screen buttons to see if it was their phone. Notification scheduling: Once a week I hear about someone missing a call or ignoring a text due to their audible alerts being turned off because they silence their phone at night or in morning classes and forget to turn the ringer back on. Diverse vibrate options: When your phone is in vibrate mode, aside from receiving a voice call, most of the other notifications which trigger vibration all trigger the exact same kind of vibration. Let us assign custom vibrations for different kinds of alerts. Three short bursts repeated twice for SMS, or two long buzzes for e-mail. SMS alerts: Let me set the number of times I will be alerted to missed SMS messages. Special alerts: Let me set a special alert for when a high priority e-mail is received, and let me set alerts for e-mails from specific people or specific headlines, e.g., "The boss is e-mailing you," or "Brett Favre has retired for the 14th time."

Better power management

Apple claims to pride itself on being "green," but when it comes to the iPhone, it doesn't give us much to work with. A few improvements would make the iPhone more efficient, and make the battery last longer.

Power scheduling: A great feature found on many smartphones and implemented best on the BlackBerry lets me set a schedule when the phone and/or its antenna is active. Hey, we're all supposed to be conserving energy, right? Well, on weekdays I don't need my phone on from midnight to 6am. Let me automate that. Advanced e-mail scheduling for accounts, push: Push is one of the things that makes the Blackberry experience so delicious. Apple, let us specify what hours our e-mail accounts are in Push versus Fetch mode. Second, let us schedule when accounts check e-mail at all. Some of my friends say they wish they could tell their phone not to check work e-mail at night or on weekends.

Get serious about the Mail app and task switching

Mail on the iPhone is a very unsatisfactory experience when compared to other smartphones. Sure, it's "good enough" for most people, but then again, settling for mediocrity is like eating fish sticks when you could be dining on seared ahi. Here are some much-needed improvements for Mail:

Unified inbox support and/or better inbox switching: If you have more than one mail account, you know what a pain it is to switch between accounts. Currently it takes a minimum of four taps to switch from one inbox to another. Allow unification, or make it easy to switch between accounts. Or how about both? Full e-mail storage and synchronization: Unlike the BlackBerry and other smartphones, the iPhone does not synchronize folders until you go into them (if you have Exchange, you do have the option of pushing all of your folders). If you have a sizable sent folder, for instance, if you pop into it looking for a message you sent today, the phone will proceed to download in chronological order everything in your sent inbox. This makes using any folder but the inbox a general pain. But it also greatly limits the effectiveness of the search. Allow actions from within search: It's great to be able to search e-mail on the iPhone, but it's lame that you can't do much with the search results. Once you have your results, you cannot delete or move those items into other folders. And expand it! Currently you can only search in the folder you are in, which isn't much help if you're not sure which folder something is in. Running apps in the background: When I'm on the road, I find I am opening and closing Mail constantly because I can't run other apps in the background. Need to check my calendar? Need to see something on the Web? Open, close, open, close, open. Both Palm and Google have managed to pull this off, and we know it can be done on jailbroken iPhones. Standard data conduit protocol: Palm mastered this, and there's no reason Apple can't (we just suspect they don't want to). We need a standardized conduit protocol for third-party apps to synchronize data between the phone and a desktop. Lots of people have come up with clever solutions, typically using Bonjour autodiscovery, but there are all sorts of problems on the desktop side, such as a proliferation of background processes, open ports, and firewall hassles.

In sum...

Most of these suggestions don't require moving mountains. I purposely stayed away from technological pies in the sky in order to focus on things that I think should truly be deliverable in the coming months. In fact, most of these things should have been delivered already.

Stay tuned for our laundry list for the Google Android. We have plenty of thoughts there as well.