JOEyGADGET

Last summer I wrote a story for MSNBC.com the iPhone (Can the iPhone do double-duty as a laptop replacement?), and a companion story (iWish: iPhone updates we’d like to see).

With Apple’s release today of the iPhone 1.1.3 update for iPhone, a number of new features have been added. Weirdly, a number of the top wish-list items – like the ability to cut and paste, or lookup a contact by typing in a few characters of a person’s name or contact info, the way you can on every other mobile phone in the world – are still absent.

Although only one of the 25 wish list items was addressed in today’s 1.1.3 iPhone software update, it is a big one: The ability to “Manually manages music and videos.”

To many the value of this feature (which has always been an option on iPods) isn’t obvious. The short explanation: With this feature turned on, you never have to worry about whether songs on your various playlists duplicate one another, hogging precious storage space. Thank you, Apple.

As Apple chairman Steve Jobs stated today, there are still 50 weeks left in 2008 to release more iPhone improvements, so at a rate one every other week they just might get to those remaining 24 wish list items by the time we’ve got a new president in the White House.

Let’s hope.