Apple doesn’t seem to get texting. We had to wait until the recent iPhone upgrade just to get texting to multiple recipients. Their texting UI is the crummiest on the planet - all eye-candy and no function. It’s not possible to forward a text message for heaven’s sake. Given the high number of forwarded texts sent every day on the networks, how dumb is that? It’s also not possible to text a contact’s info to someone else.

Following on from my previous post about lack of innovation in the ‘mobile platform’, there’s also nothing innovative about the address book. Interestingly, it is not seen as a central part of the device at all - it’s not possible to access it via the home screen. It is seen as a feature of the phone. When I got the device, I kept hunting around for the ‘Address book’ icon, but there wasn’t (isn’t) one. The address book should be the hub of the device. When I designed the services for a ‘Youth’ MVNO, we made the whole service portfolio revolve around the address book, aka buddy list. In other words, you bring your buddies’ stuff (their music, whereabouts, status etc.) to your address book, not your address book to Facebook, Faceparty, Twitter or some other network. Make the social network the platform, but it has to be open.

Anyway, what I proposed for the MVNO wasn’t possible, although we tried to engineer it around IM clients from the likes of Colibria. This was two years ago. It still isn’t possible for a number of reasons to do with the real-time apps plane being stuck in the embedded world and the agile Web UI plane being stuck in the browser world. On mobiles, and generally, they don’t yet meet, as argued in my recent post on challenges for Mobile 2.0 architectures.

As I first reported about my iPhone habits, the whole phone part is plain vanilla, apart from the visual voicemail. I don’t do anything differently with voice/texting as a result of owning an iPhone. The visual voicemail is a great idea, although when I hold out the device and press play (on a voicemail message) I’m naturally expecting to hear it, just like podcasts and songs come out the speakers. However, it doesn’t, not unless you press the ’speaker’ button. Why break the UI paradigm for this app?

Technorati Tags: texting, iPhone, address book, MVNO, Colibria