On Tech Republic, Jason Hiner gives us his 10 biggest tech belly flops of 2007. Among them, that the iPhone doesn’t have 3G. This has been mentioned many times in reviews. I hardly think it counts as a belly flop given the otherwise incredible features of the device. In fact, I’m dubious of a 3G iPhone. As those of us who have used 3G in anger know that battery life is a problem. Nonetheless, given that the UI does support full-page web surfing so easily, it does highlight that the connection speed is now the weakest link. In the UK when I can’t get on WiFi or Edge, the performance is lousy. It would be useful to tell the browser to somehow switch to the WAP page (when one is available).

However, I don’t think it it is the biggest feature that I’d like to see next. The fact that there is no push email (with optimised transport stream, like Blackberry) is my main gripe. It’s simply a backwards step to revert to polling of email boxes, unless you have a Yahoo account, which I’m loathe to set up just to get the push feature.

User experience is more than just a fantastic UI. It is the entire mobility experience. For example, just by looking at the Blackberry, I know that I have new email since the last time I looked because of that LED change to red from green. On the iPhone I get that irritating number of unread emails, which is always a high number because I don’t read all my emails. Am I supposed to remember what the number was last time I looked? Also, for multiple accounts, I have to go in and out of each mailbox to see the new mail. A single aggregated “latest email since you last looked” view would be useful.

Anyone who has never used a Blackberry simply won’t get the experience of push email and how it leads to a real-time or conversational use of email (almost like texting) that has real benefits. In this sense, the Blackberry is a joy to use - the email experience is fantastic and still remains the best in its class.

The economy of mobility is an important part of the mobile experience and many people still don’t get it and want to think of the mobile connection as just another low-cost IP pipe (albeit slower than we’d like). Even the Blackberry misses a trick with roaming. As a traveller (who pays his own mobile bill), I want to restrict my roaming costs. On both the Blackberry and the iPhone it’s an all or nothing choice. What I’d like to see is a roaming filter. For example, only notify me of emails from my Vonage voicemail account, or whoever.

Of course, the iPhone is only going to get better, as it, I expect, the Blackberry. This can only be good news for improving the mobile experience, which still has a long way to go.