iPhone 3G
I've completed the reservation process for my iPhone 3G this morning. I've asked for a 16Gb model. They don't have a box to select the white or black version, so I'll have to double check on that soon. My current mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson 608i will be two years old at the time I upgrade so my "upgrade phone every two years"-rule seems to hold up.
Reading over the material online, it has most of what I wanted: 3G, and built-in GPS. The only thing I did not get was a upgrade to 32Gb.
With the â¬199 price point (for the 8Gb model), the biggest complaint that people I've talked to had, also goes away. The price is very competitive when compared with other phones I see around here. I don't see the iPod Touch keeping the current price though, so I expect that to drop real soon now.
Regarding the "background apps" stuff, the solution Apple came out with should be enough for the XMPP crowd. Sending a badge with the number of pending messages covers most of the XMPP clients needs. It remains to be seen if we can convert those pushed messages to a sound so that the user knows that it has something that requires attention. Another thing: how well will this work? Does it keep the radio on all the time? or does it uses a SMS message to send its notifications? More questions than answers actually.
There are a lot of pending questions also about the 3G capability: can I use the iPhone as a Modem for my Mac? Via bluetooth? Will it provide a bluetooth PAN? That would be the best case scenario, given that Mac OS X supports Bluetooth PAN's since 10.4.9.
And the GPS, will I have a Bluetooth serial port to access the NMEA stream? If we get that, and a decent dock for cars, a lot of Tom Tom's could go Bye Bye, with just a decent software upgrade.
The last thing that caught my eye was that you can download applications to your iPhone without going through the App store. Enterprises will be able to push applications to devices directly, and there is an "ad-hoc" mode to send applications directly to the device. I could not find details on these two options, though. Something to keep an eye out for.
All in all, with the iTunes App Store also opening up and having access to applications outside Apple control, I think it will be a good phone for me in the next two years.
Update: one last thing - the fact that we still got the same shitty camera doesn't bother me as much as the lack of video capture. All my phones so far had under two mega-pixels and they worked just fine for me needs. I can only hope that this is not a hardware but a software limitation.
Update: and the bad news keep on coming - from the iPhone 3G spec page, the Audible formats supported no longer include version 4. Sucks really bad, because that was the recommended for iPods so all my books are in format 4.