Multi-tasking and tethering have been standard smartphone features for a long time. I can personally remember those as far back as 2001.

You forget. Apple's whole strategy is to remove features in order to focus a product. Apple wins by doing less than everyone else.

Who else sells a computer with only one mouse button? Who else sells a phone with only one button? No copy/paste? Awful APIs that prevent you from really reading camera data? First iPod had less disk space than any other player First iPod had no windows support Safari's extension support are crappy relative to FF or even IE OSX dock can display 1/100th the apps of menus on other OSes

Apple's strategy is to cut features. This is roughly equivalent to asceticism: finding enlightenment by doing less. Like asceticism, this seems a bad idea on the surface, but some people really seem happier doing it.

To be totally honest, I had to look up what tethering meant today as I had no idea what the term meant.

Disclaimer: The closest I own to a smart phone is one of these email/phone/web devices they sell in Japan that has a pita interface to use.

True, but the iPhone is new whereas other phone oss' have been around for years. It takes time and manpower to code for these, and you have to start somewhere.

Yeah, and the iPhone started with OS X and went from there. Something tells me OS X can multi-task.

(Keep in mind: Playing music and txting / getting phone calls is multi-tasking.)

MMS is useful for talking to old legacy phones :/ Nice to have, but hardly critical.

In Europe everyone has MMS.

Tho' this is becoming less important because people on all platforms just post to Facebook or Flickr directly from their phones now, but even so, lack of MMS hurt iPhone early on.

Disagree. I doubt many iPhone users really mind. You email people your pictures instead of MMS :/ they get them when they're at their computer if their phone can't do email.

(I'm in Europe, not everyone has MMS).

Actually it was the other way round - my iPhone wielding friends complained that people kept sending them MMS messages that they had to visit a website to see!

Receiving MMS on the iPhone (on AT&T) has been a total joke so far.

You get a text message that says to go to viewmymessage.com with some ridiculous username & password pairing. Since you can't copy & paste, or multi-task, you have to somehow remember what that combination is. Of course, once you've managed to pull up the page, you find out that the multi-media part of the message is a SWF... Which the iPhone doesn't support.

I hear WWDC10 will unveil Grand Central Teleportation.