Apple iPhone 3G

When the Apple iPhone came out last year it made me mad.  Now Apple has announced an updated version of the phone and I'm even more mad.  Not at Apple, who have done a fine job, but with the rest of the mobile phone manufacturers who still seem largely asleep to the possibilities of what a mobile phone can be.

First the iPhone 3G features that are not new to Apple but give it parity with other leading-edge devices:

• HSDPA (3G) data connectivity - although this higher-speed network was available in most parts of the world when Apple introduced its original iPhone and has long been available on competing products such as the Nokia N95, Apple took a year to support it on the iPhone, probably due to size and power requirements of the chips that were available then.  Better late than never.
• GPS.  Ditto.
• Enterprise features.  Apple went in one release from claiming they were not interested in business users to providing just about every feature an enterprise IT department could want, such as VPN, remote deactivation.
• An SDK so we can have applications from developers other than those hand-picked by Apple.
• A return to the traditional (in the US anyway) carrier subsidy model, in which AT&T will subsidize the purchase price of the phone but not share any on the recurring revenue.  This will cost AT&T more money in the short term but they will make it up with the higher average revenue per user (ARPU) which for iPhones has been twice their regular take.
• The "unlimited" data plan is increasing in price from te current $20/month to $30 - $45 for "business" users.

But here are the breakthrough features:

• $199 price.  While high for a generic phone, it's a deal for something with this many features and should give it mass-market appeal.  One pitfall is that the $199 price requires a two year contract, which will result in lots of annoyed users a year from now when Apple is likely to release an even better model.
• mobileme -"Exchange for the rest of us."  Syncs email, photos, contacts, calendars.  Some of this is old hat, but why is it that only the iPhone and the Blackberry have true push email instead of lamely expecting the phone to wake up every so often and pull mail off the server?
• As previously announced, the SDK includes the Cocoa framework from the Mac, which encourages building applications that are much more elegant that what one currently expects from a phone.

And the disappointments:

• VoIP is limited to the WiFi network.  I guess Apple still needs to keep AT&T happy.
• No video streaming from the phone.
• Applications must be distributed through the Apple Store and must be "approved" by Apple.
• No background tasks, although Apple will provide a push notification mechanism.

Comments

[Mark Waks]

No background tasks, although Apple will provide a push notification mechanism.

Depending on what this means, it could be a pretty big deal. I've been wrestling with the SMS issue for CommYou -- the economics of SMS are, to put it politely, bugf*** insane. I'd like to be able to do phone I/O, but SMS simply isn't an option unless I get a deep-pocketed backer. (I still wonder how much Twitter is paying per year for it.)

So if this push mechanism is free or close to it, this would be major incentive for apps like mine to start moving aggressively into the iPhone. I don't really need background tasks *if* I can register a push handler that works smoothly. If that can pop up my app quickly and automatically, it might actually be the ideal approach for me...

[Christopher Herot]

It looks like the push notification mechanism will work over a persistent IP connection, so that should solve your cost problem. It will be seeded to developers next month and generally available in September.