The iPhone’s long-missing two-pane email client

So I was looking over my Macworld 2007 keynote coverage the other day and noticed something just about everyone — myself included — glossed over as the months passed between its January introduction and June launch: the iPhone once had a two-pane email client. (You can even see the view mode selector up top! This later became the edit button.)

Anyone who knows me and my email-addicted ways knows how desperately I loathe the iPhone’s mail client, and, given its frequency of use, how much I wish they’d improve it. Apple: three simple steps to make email nerds like me happy.

1. Add delete for multiple / all messages.
2. Fix the annoying bug that just lets the iPhone idle while some HTML messages are not downloaded / parsed.
3. Give us (back) the two-pane view mode!

That’s not so hard, now is it? One more minor email client diff after the break. More…