What I'm expecting from the next iPhone

Spring is a time of anticipation for the summer (and, boy, New York City keeps the suspense this year). And it's also the time of the buildup for the next iPhone. This year, Apple is not alone, though as Palm tries to spoil the party as good as it can. This is good for us: it already has prompted Apple to fill some of the glaring holes in the iPhone with it's next software release: cut & paste, landscape e-mail, MMS and such inexplicable omissions like logging into your YouTube account.

But what's going to happen on the hardware front? Here's my wish list:

• Better battery life. If Apple releases the 3G just with twice the battery I'd be happy. Battery life is the achilles heel of all mobile devices and the iPhone has become much more than a phone: games, the Kindle, Skype and all kinds of social networking clients can keep you busy for hours. And after this you need enough juice left to make some phone calls.


• More memory. I don't doubt that there will a 32 GB version, which is enough to retire my iPod classic for good, if it breaks.


• Better camera. As an engaged amateur I would take a better camera with me whenever I anticipate taking pictures, but it would be certainly useful, if the iPhone could produce decent pictures in more situations, such as low-light.


• Video. Not sure if this requires an hardware upgrade at all. Anyway, would be a nice to have.


• Faster hardware. No reason to complain about the existing hardware, but faster is always better.

And here's what I don't want to see (and which I believe Apple won't include):

• Any kind of sliding, swiveling, flipping keyboard. I don't want to have moving parts on the iPhone and the on-screen keyboard, at least for me, works perfectly for short e-mails, tweets and text messages.


• Video conferencing. What is that supposed to be good for? It probably won't really work on a cellular network and I cannot see a lot of situations, where it is appropriate to watch your counter-party on the screen, provided that she has the technology available to be seen at all.

Of course, as of now, nobody knows, but I'm looking forward to all those rumors that will float through the networks during the next weeks.