Just last week I picked up an iPhone. I’ve been very happy with it, and for a 1.0 product it is absolutely amazing, especially from a software point of view.

There are of course a couple of things that I would love to see on it, a to-do list would be nice, some better way to scroll through really long documents, minor things really. Its great how the iPhone syncs with iTunes and iPhoto so well, and the email integration (now that I have my gmail account forwarded through an IMAP server) is great too. Throw in the great integration of NetNewsWire and NewsGator’s iPhone site and nearly all of my typical online tasks are supported.

There are however a couple of integration related things that are puzzling to me. While everyone is clamoring to see their favorite 3rd party apps ported to the iPhone, what I’d like to see is more of Apple’s applications supported by the iPhone.

iPhone doesn’t work with iWork

I’ve been using Pages as my primary word processor since it came out. It does everything that I need a word processor to do. But unfortunately although I can read documents created by Microsoft Word, there is no way (yet) to read documents created in Pages unless I export them to PDF or Word format first. The same goes for Numbers vs Excel. (Though I only currently use numbers for minor things since it doesn’t support two key features that I use in Excel, good scatter plots and regression lines).

What I would really like to see in terms of iWork integration is a way to view Keynote presentations on the iPhone, even better would be the ability to pipe them out through the TV out cable.

Leading by Example

Since the iPhone “SDK” came out, Apple has really been pushing hard for people to develop iPhone-optimized sites. They setup a section on their developer site that helps you develop web apps for the iPhone and have recently added a new section on their site where developers can showcase web applications specifically designed for the iPhone. This is a great idea and it has made it possible for me to find some great sites that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Unfortunately Apple’s iPhone web apps site looks lousy when viewed on the iPhone. When you browse to that site, you have to do a combination of rotating, scrolling, pinching, and tapping just to get the app list to fit on a screen in such a way to see the icon, the description, and the link button at the same time.

The iPhone is still awesome

I can certainly see why if the iPhone dev team had to choose between getting Word and Excel or Pages and Numbers compatibility working in 1.0 that they went with the compatibility with Office. The demand for that feature is certainly much greater. I just hope that one day in the not to distant future, that iPhone and iWork will see i to i.