New iPhone OS: What we’d like to see

Apple is expected to provide a sneak peek tomorrow at a new operating system, dubbed iPhone 3.0, for its iPhone smart phone (included in our smart phone Ratings, available to subscribers), and presumably also for its iPod Touch multimedia player, too (which is in our MP3 player Ratings, also available to subscribers) . Here’s what we’d like to see from the first major overhaul of the iPhone OS since last June.

• Better search capability. Apple could use more sophisticated tools for searching the Web, to keep up with what the upcoming Palm Pre promises to do.
  
  The Pre, due within the next few months, will supposedly aggregate and continuously update all the relevant elements pertaining to contacts, calendars, and messaging. For example, if you have information on Jane Doe in Outlook, Google, and Facebook, it will put details from those normally unconnected sources under Jane's name. Ditto for calendars and messaging. Even if you start communicating with Jane on IM then switch to e-mail, Palm’s WebOS will show all of your exchanges in one "chat-style" view.

• The ability to edit Office documents. While iPhone allows you to view Office documents, you can edit them only by buying and installing third-party applications like Quickoffice's MobileFiles Pro ($10), which allows you to edit Excel spreadsheets. Palm, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry phones allow you edit a wide array of documents out of the box.



• Better battery life. Though power efficiency is in part a hardware issue, software upgrades can also lead to improved battery life. The iPhone's battery life in our tests is okay, even compared to other GSM phones, which tend to be more miserly with power than phones that use CDMA technology (as employed by Verizon and Sprint-Nextel). But other smart phones are better in this critical dimension of performance.

Stay tuned for our take on the preview tomorrow.

—Mike Gikas