ey own, but paying it some attention could make that built-in feature much less of a compromise.

Battery life The iPhone's battery life is decent, until you start using the Wi-Fi, GPS, playing games--in other words, all the things people want to do with their phones these days. By all accounts, the average battery life of competitors isn't really any better than the iPhone's, but one thing is clear in the smartphone market: people love using their devices, so the longer you let them actually use them, the better.

Software, etc.

Overall, the iPhone's software has been its greatest asset in breaking into the smartphone market. And, as on the Mac, Apple is committed to continually rolling out new iPhone features via software updates. But as good as the iPhone OS is, there are certainly a number of places where it beats the competition, but falls short of the ideal.

Improved PIM functionality While they may not be PDAs, smartphones have essentially rendered that class of device obsolete. The iPhone lets you track your contacts, your appointments, and your e-mail, but all of those features could use improvements. Both Android 2.0 and the Palm Pre, for example, let you integrate contact information from other online services like Facebook. The iPhone's calendar is particularly weak; most notably it still doesn't allow syncing To Do items with iCal. But Mail isn't much better, lacking full-body search, a unified inbox option, and message flagging, among other features. Exchange support made the iPhone more appealing to corporate users, but giving some attention to their bread-and-butter functionality could win even more converts.

Wireless Syncing We've reached the end of the 2000s and--besides not having come up with a really good nickname for the decade--it seems ridiculous that we still have to plug a phone as connected as the iPhone into our computer with an actual cable. MobileMe subscribers and Exchange users can sync contacts and calendar information to their iPhones over-the-air, but even they still have to carry around a USB cable to transfer movies, music, and podcasts. Apple lets you download that content directly to the phone from the iTunes Store over Wi-Fi--why not let you grab them from your computer over the local network?

Multitasking and Notifications Yes, Apple finally rolled out support for push notifications, its answer to background processes, in iPhone 3.0. More and more, that fix seems like a stopgap along the lines of Web-based apps making a sufficient iPhone SDK. It seems inevitable that the iPhone will eventually allow multiple apps to run at the same time--at the very least, it's important for apps that play audio and certain other classes of applications, such as instant messaging clients. That said, Apple also needs to improve the way it handl

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