INSIDE MOBILE: Mobile and Wireless 2009 Wish List

Now that the New Year is here, I could try to predict what will happen (often things don't turn out that way), give major trends (nice, but aren't specific enough for most people), or I could state what I hope would happen in the mobile and wireless market for the coming year.

I have chosen to present my "Mobile and Wireless 2009 Wish List" with the hope that it will drive many of the vendors to seriously consider these recommendations for their product plans, and drive customers to demand them from vendors. Let's get to it.

Apple

1. Apple iPhone

a. Put politics aside and provide support for Adobe Flash

b. Add clipboard cut/copy and paste

c. Allow enterprises to monitor and control applications

d. Build a new model that includes a real keyboard

e. Select multiple e-mails and delete them with one action without having to go to Edit

f. Search within e-mail folder

g. Sort e-mail by "From" with alpha directory (like in Contacts)

h. Add turn-by-turn navigation (work with TeleNav)

i. Add a back arrow on lower-level menus

j. Get RIM to develop BlackBerry client—leverages installations that already have or plan to install the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) but have employees who want to use the iPhone. Allows connectivity to both Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino

k. Allow applications to run in the background so they can provide alerts and services at appropriate times

l. Provide mobile broadcast—eight channels of video and 12 channels of music, along with datacasting

2. MacBook

a. Get Microsoft to develop Outlook for the Mac

b. Better Windows-to-Mac conversion tools. This would really help Windows users to convert more easily to the Mac

c. Encourage Microsoft to develop Internet Explorer for Mac

3. iTunes/iPod

a. Allow any portable music player (including iPod, Zune and Sansa) to sync with iTunes (creates iTunes as the master control tower for all music players)

b. Allow iPod to work with other sources of online music and video (creates iPod as the best way to interact with all rich media on the Internet)

c. Work with streaming sources such as RealNetworks to provide multiple channels of streaming music through iTunes (creates iTunes as the master director for all good streaming music sources)

4. OS X

a. Offer OS X for all Intel notebooks with full compatibility—let users decide whether to load it on their notebook versus Windows