While I don't find themes useful really, as every past phone I've had I only themed just to get rid of the ugly provider defaults (and the iPhones defaults are by no means ugly), let's see: iPhone lets you customize menus, change the log-in screen photo, and set custom ring-tones. Is that not theming in a sense?
Yes, that's a good point. I think I might actually consider that theming, although not in the strictest sense of the word.
As far as forwarding of SMS, I don't recall that being on most of my past phones, but how useful is that?
I don't use it often (then again, I don't write many SMS's), but it's a nice, basic feature.
Most people forward things that are too lengthy to be repeated, or things that have attachments.
I think you're confusing mail with SMS – I have never received an SMS with an attachment.
Full sized regular email is free on the iPhone. Pictures can be emailed directly from the iPhone at no charge. Most providers charge to use email and SMS.
Without going into how dataplans work in each country that have (real) smart phones, I have to say that an MMS is rather different than sending a photo attached. With the MMS you can send it directly to someones phone – even if they don't have a phone with email. The same argument could be used against having SMS's on there too: You can send a mail, which can be much longer, you can attach basically anything etc. Well, yeah, but it's used differently than mail.
How is being charged by AT&T to send pictures through the very limited hospices of size and format-limited SMS a great feature that's lacking?
If anything, what's lacking on the iPhone (and I say this from having used one since day one) is the ability to capture and save video. While I wouldn't have cared for it on past phones because their imaging sensors were crappy low res and the phones wouldn't have had the speed to do anything better than 3GPP anyways, the iPhone is fully capable (as we've seen in 3rd party software already) of doing high quality video (and probably has the processor muscle enough to store video in full-resolution MP4 with AAC sound even). Doubtless that is coming...
Okay, I'm not "in the market" for a phone right now, and certainly not one as the iPhone with the bulk of a 3g, the price of a 3g yet not even close to the features of those. But what I don't understand with this phone, is that there should be no reason to eclude MMS, SMS-forwarding, or, as your wishes goes: To record and save video. Even my SGH-x820 can do that. And it's a nononsense phone, with nothing but the most basics in todays world of "phone gadgets".
Apple isn't releasing all the features meant for every new device lately up front, because they've learned an important game of psychological marketing. Apple is metering out some lesser-important features over the product life between major hardware revisions.
That may be true (I think it is), but they are crippling things way too much so that one might get "added functionality" later on (which, by the looks of how the iTouch apps was handled, will force users to pay to get decent features). We're not talking about "some great features here. We are talking about having crippled the iPhones in areas that ought to basic in product.
I wonder how long it will take before people catch on this: Buy a product that is dearer but can do much much less than the competitor's. Then, if you're lucky, we'll add the features the competitor's already have for a small sum later on. If you're really lucky, you won't even be able to buy them a la carte, we might just come out with a new piece of hardware, you will have to buy to get those basic features. It's a double-sale!!
It provides occasional rewards to its early adopters for buying in early before all the features are in place that they eventually do get new functionality while giving Apple time to work the bugs out on things that may be technically harder to role out in time for an initial product launch.
Yes, let's hope that SDK isn't a crippled one, then. Let's hope it's all what people have been clamouring for.
