Apple will open the doors to the press this morning for an event at which it is expected to unveil the iPhone 5. The feeling among consumers is that Apple needs to provide major updates to iOS 6 and the device in order to remain competitive in the wake of Android's improvements and the announcement of Windows Phone 8.

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With that in mind, here is what Mobilenapps.com wants in iOS 6.

New UI

The company is under pressure to refresh the design from the grid-based layout it introduced with the original iPhone in 2007 and continues to use today. With the customizable nature of Android and the original tile-based Modern UI of Windows Phone, Apple's UI looks quite limited. The introduction of the Weather and Stock app widgets were a small step towards greater functionality, but the company needs to offer a new and different UI as it did back in 2007. Playing catch-up to competitors may not be good enough for skeptical consumers.

Bigger folders

Preferably, having installed apps on a single home screen on iOS is ideal; swiping across multiple screens to find Sonic the Hedgehog or Eurosport is annoying. Many consumers want larger folders to store apps, and better multitasking to navigate multiple home screens (more on that below). Twelve apps per folder probably is a sufficient size to accommodate power users.

Expose-esque multitasking

iOS's current multitasking implementation suffers from two problems. First, it requires multiple presses of a physical home button and then potentially multiple swipes to open/close an app and a swipe to access media controls. Second, the physical home button deteriorates over time. Users that have owned an iPhone 4/3GS for a couple of years probably are not getting reliable actions when double-tapping the home button. Multitasking similar to Expose in Mac OS X, where users swipe up with four fingers to display open apps on a single screen in one window, would increase functionality and speed. The difficulty is creating a gesture that works on the 4-inch screen, though the video below demonstrates how it could work.

Apple's event in Cupertino kicks off today at 10AM pacific time (head here for a time conversion).

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