iPhone – how they forgot the importance of SMS

I love the iPhone. However there are some shocking failings that persist even after several software revisions. They have particularly managed to completely miss out very basic features of SMS (texting) that every phone under the sun has. I don’t care about MMS and picture message crap – its the basics that matter.

Notable omissions include:

• You cannot forward an SMS you have received to another person
• You cannot send a number/vCARD from your address book to somebody else via SMS. Even my 9 year old Nokia 6100 did that.
• You cannot send an SMS to a group in your Contacts book, without adding each person from the group manually. They added group SMS in an early firmware revision, but didn’t add a way to select just the group and have all members added. Sending a message to 20 people in a group is very boring.
• When choosing the “Text Message” option in address book it does not automatically select their mobile number
• SMS is treated as a separate feature from Phone where dialing, contacts, voicemail are. This is a bizarre and false separation. Contacts appear in the main home screen and in Phone – SMS should be the same.
• There is no “mark all read” option on the main SMS summary screen – so even for short messages you’ve already read in the preview/alert screen, you have to go and view each manually.

This functionality is so basic and fundamentally affects the usefulness of SMS on iPhone.

Come on Steve, give us SMS we can be proud of!