iPhone development so far still has something missing

There’s something missing on my iPhone home screen, and I’m not sure what it is.

The iPhone is a very rare tech gadget, in the sense that the whole iPhone development process has been quite unusual. In the two years of its existence, it has changed a lot–gone through entire evolutionary cycles within just a year. But what’s striking is that it has still changed very little in terms of appearance. The screen size, the number of buttons, these things are all the same. There’s only been a minor change in the design of the back panel, and the color options have  changed from silver to black / white.

Compare this with how other phones are developed. Motorola launches a Motorazr flip phone, which is all about the thinness, and the sharp knife-edge look, and then at the same time they’re also offering a curvy, plump MotoPebl.

That doesn’t mean the iPhone hasn’t changed. In many ways, the iPhone development process has been far more dramatic.

Real change, they say, come from within. (I enjoy terrible puns, yes!) So while the standard Motorola offerings have changed very little, except in terms of design and form factor, the iPhone development was all about upgrading the operating system, and offering more, not just a new look.

And this brings me to my point, at last. One way to measure the change in iPhone in terms of its development is to take a look at it’s home screen, and see what has changed.

When the original iPhone launched, the home screen looked like this:

As you can see, there were five empty spaces on the iPhone home screen back then. This version was sensational for its overall smooth user experience, but there wasn’t much you could do in terms of installing apps or playing new games. That changed when, after a considerable effort, iPhone development reached a new stage with the release of the 2.0 Operating System a year later. The new iPhone had a home screen which looked like this:

Three icons had been added: iTunes store, App Store, and Contacts. By default, the Contacts icon was moved to the second screen, leaving two empty spaces. We used the iPhone this way for another year, and then 3.0 was launched. This version added one more icon to the home screen of my iPhone: The voice memo icon. So this is the home screen of my iPhone at present:

Now the question is: what’s the one icon that’s missing? What will iPhone 4.0 offer that I haven’t even thought of? One possibility is that Apple will launch it’s own e-book store, and create new icon for it on the home screen. But that’s rather unlikely. Maybe the new icon won’t be anything so big, but just a small change, like the voice memo app. Still–any guesses, anyone?