Wishes for iPhone OS 4 (or, Nic has first-world problems)

If Apple continues rolling out iPhone upgrades like they have been the last few years, we should see both new hardware and version 4 of iPhone OS this summer.

Let it be understood that I love my iPhone to an unhealthy degree—it’s my daily reminder that I live in the fuuuuutuuuuuure. I have no idea what the happy elves in Cupertino are cooking up for the next release—the current hardware and software are so good it’s hard to think of features to add.

That being said, here are a few small things I would love to see Apple improve.

• Unified inbox. Performing e-mail triage on an iPhone when you have several accounts involves an unholy amount of sliding back and forth. Just let me see my new e-mail in one place, pretty please?

• Custom e-mail sounds. Have you ever been in a meeting where more than five people have iPhones? Bink, bink, bink! Or when two people in the household have iPhones, and they sit charging next to each other, how do you tell who just got an e-mail? I’ve actually thought about jailbreaking my iPhone just to be able to replace the e-mail sound¹. At least for me, it’s a real pain point.

• Spoken song titles. Whenever I listen to a new album on the iPhone, I want to know the song titles. Yes, I can pull the iPhone out of my pocket and look at it, but that’s not really fuuuuutuuuuuure. If the meager iPod Shuffle can be a creepy automated DJ, why not the iPhone?

¹ Down that path lies madness…