The iPhone 5 gives me my first chance to play around with Siri, Apple’s digital assistant that debuted with the iPhone 4S. (My previous phone was the 4.) I’m finding her helpful as I get accustomed to asking her questions or using her for tasks instead of manually entering everything myself. But she still has some rather obvious defects.

It’s great that I can ask her who won the Eagles game Sunday night, or what the weather forecast is for the day. She has access to the music app and can play a song when I ask her to. She does a pretty good job with transcribing spoken tweets, text messages, emails, and posts to Facebook, as well as being able to access recent stock information. She also functions inside the new Maps application (though admittedly I haven’t used that feature yet except to test it out), can help you find local movies times, restaurant phone numbers, etc.

All that is well and good, but why the hell can’t Siri turn wifi on or off, or Bluetooth? These are core features of iOS, not third-party apps (like Twitter or Facebook!). I don’t understand Apple’s prioritization that doesn’t allow core features to be accessible and controlled by Siri. What are they thinking?

Yes, I know Siri is still a beta, but regardless, these are basic features that it doesn’t seem should be hard to implement. I hope they correct this soon. It’s strange that this has been either overlooked or ignored.