Over at Australian Macworld, editor Matthew JC Powell says the following in a recent story:

Imagine, for a moment, an e-mail program that doesn't allow you to search for past messages you've received except by flicking through the list and hoping you don't miss one. Imagine not having the facility to mark messages as read so they don't irritate you with notifications, except by reading them. Imagine not having the ability to have all your messages in one unified inbox except by forwarding mail from your other accounts to that one — meaning that if you also want to have mail going where it's meant to go you have to receive everything twice

After over a week of using my iPhone I have to agree - there are many things that Apple's iPhone does really well but email isn't one of them. I'd go a couple of steps further. Apple has bragged about the iPhone running OS X. Not some half-arsed stripped back mobile OS but a proper desktop OS that's been scaled to run on smaller screens with different input. However, they've left out some things that users expect from any operating system.

1 - Selecting text: Why can't I drag my finger over some text to highlight so I can delete it or copy/paste? And that brings me to Issue Number 2.

2 - Cut, copy and paste: Why can't I take some text I wrote in one place and copy or move it to another? That's plain dumb.

3 - An accessible file system: Why can't I store a few documents in a folder? At the moment, the only way I can do this is to email documents to myself. There's a proper OS under there - why can't I use it?

Here's the thing - it's really frustrating to use something that is clearly very well made and delivers on so many fronts but misses on a really fundamental feature. With the Microsoft Exchange support it's clear that Apple is aiming its sights on the lucrative corporate market. However, they'll not usurp RIM and Microsoft from the pockets of mobile execs until they get these basics right.