iPhone 3G: What we didn't get

The long-awaited 3G model, available July 11.

Australia gets the iPhone 3G on July 11 and it does indeed have quite a few improvements over the current iteration — but notable omissions have disappointed some fans.

3G is huge, of course, GPS is a welcome addition, and third-party applications are nothing to be sneezed at. Not to mention it's thinner at 115.5 millimetres by 62.1 millimetres by 12.3 millimetres, has a flush headphone jack, and just got a huge price cut. (In the US the 8GB will retail for US$199 while the 16GB will retail for US$299. Australian prices will be confirmed in the next few weeks.)

But we were expecting a lot more than what Jobs announced. Here's a short list of what we wanted from the second-gen iPhone, but just didn't get.

• Multimedia messaging — Almost every other cell phone in the market has the ability to send images to other cell phones via multimedia messaging, or MMS. Yes you can still e-mail those photos, but MMS is such a basic feature that it should've been in the iPhone from the start.
• Copy and paste — Again, this is such a basic feature. Having copy and paste makes it easier to type out text messages and e-mails.
• Video recording — In the world of mobile video, Qik, and YouTube, it's a shame the iPhone doesn't have video-recording capabilities. Yes the quality wouldn't be that great, but it should be an option anyway.
• Voice command — For a touch-screen phone, we think voice command and voice dialing would've been a great feature add-on for the iPhone. Perhaps this will be added via a third-party app, but we would really prefer this to be a native setting.
• Bluetooth flexibility — Right now, all you can use Bluetooth on the iPhone for are headset voice calls, and that's it. This is sufficient for most people, sure, but we would like for Apple and AT&T to open up the Bluetooth profiles for the iPhone. This means we would like stereo Bluetooth and A2DP for streaming music wirelessly, Bluetooth tethering so we can use the iPhone as a modem, and finally we would like to have Bluetooth file-transfer protocol so we can transfer files to and from the iPhone.

These are just a few omissions we could think of. Did the iPhone 3G meet your expectations, or would you rather it have a few more features? Let us know in the comments!