As far as I can tell there are four functions needed on most screens (some don't need the delete so it sometimes becomes a duplicate back key) and four buttons (not (including the direction arrows) on my phone. This should be a very simple one-to-one mapping and when a function isn't need, it's button is turned off instead of taking a different function because I get confused about what does what where.

Now that's just getting someone into the address book, managing it is a whole other problem. My phone lets me create groups for my contacts, and other phones offer more features and handle this better, but the only purpose of groups is to display contacts in that group, which takes long and when I do this I can't search like I can when I just pull up the entire address book. Most phones don't offer a way to get at your most frequent contacts other than putting them on speed dial and I don't accept speed dial is the end of the line, especially with all these extra function buttons on the phone. And then there is syncing the address book with a computer, which is more appropriate for making edits anyway. This is a place where Apple has had a lot of experience from syncing iPods and settings via .mac.

Then there is voice, text and e-mail. Everything I said above about entering a name applies here as well, but then just the listing screens can be so much better designed. My phone lists txt messages with the send and the first line of the message, all of which is set in bold without spacing between each message. The name can be large and bold, but the first line should be in the smaller and non-bold font. Along with that it should also track what I've done with a message and show icons when I've replied and forwarded messages, just like an e-mail program does.

My biggest issue of all is with voicemail, which cell phones do little more than tell you you've got a new ones and when I call in to check then I have to remember the which button does what.

More than once I've deleted a message instead of just skipped it, but why is that? On the surface it could be fixed the quick and dirty way by putting labels on the buttons saying what they do for voicemail, but that means there'd be duplicate buttons again for delete, next and other functions. Improving upon that the voice mail functions could be mapped from the numbers to the other function buttons. Delete would map to delete, next to the next button, and you get the drift, but below the surface the problem didn't start when I pressed the wrong key, it started with me listening to a voicemail message I didn't want to listen to.

Solving that problem means ditching the whole system of calling into voicemail and having to go through each message one by one. It seriously was easy on my parents answering machine 15 years ago, because that had one big blue button which skipped to the next message. Instead, voicemail would be easier if I could use a listing like txt and e-mail to see who left a message, when and if I've listened to it. Doing that has a lot of technical complications (does a cell phone get an itemized list of voicemails waiting, or just that there is one or more?), but I've been thinking what if you did away with calling into voicemail and moved the whole thing onto the phone, which could answer the call, but answer it as voicemail without having to bother you with it. This would let the phone be able to show you an e-mail like listing of messages. When your phone is actually off or out of range, the phone companies voicemail would pick it up, but when the phone get pinged that you've got messages it could silently call in and get the count before notifying you and start downloading them. The phone would be able to do this because it would be programmed to understand the voices used by supported company's voicemail system and turn it into the text used on the listing screen.

These are ideas I've had about improving the interface on cell phones, which getting back to the rumors are what I think Apple would focus on first if they designed a cell phone. Most people already associate Apple being simple and easy to use which puts them in a good place for any market they want to enter where the majority of products are hard to use and overly complicated.

We'll see tomorrow what actually happens.