Thoughts on iPhone 3.0

I watched a few liveblogs on iPhone 3.0 (namely gizmodo’s). I must say that I had high expectations going into the event, given the state of iPhone OS 2.0 (pretty good but not quite there).

iPhone has been one of my biggest thrills and disappointments at the same time. On the one hand, it ushered in a new era of innovation in mobile computing. No more crappy WinMo UI or Symbian UI. On the other, it lacked the simplest features that most Moto and SE flip/candybar phones feature:

1. Bluetooth file xfer
2. Blutooth tethering
3. A2DP
4. Almost anything else Bluetooth
5. MMS

And it definitely lacked features that WinMo has had for years:

1. API access to almost anything
2. Multitasking (WinMo did it with 200MHz processors and crappy batteries so surely Apple can)
3. Copy and paste!

Well, Apple fixed most of that today. They showed off a lot of new features in iPhone 3.0, many of which should have been there in version 1.1. I’m generally pleased by Apple’s announcements.

What’s coming in iPhone 3.0? Well, take a look at all of the stuff I wanted above — you’ll get most of it. Here’s the skinny — consumers get:

1. Copy and paste!! (FINALLY!)
2. A2DP (stereo bluetooth audio — wanted this for 2 years)
3. Bluetooth tethering if AT&T allows it (I’m sure they will for a healthy $30 a month or some such fee)
4. Spotlight – search for stuff in Apple apps or use it as a launcher to find apps
5. MMS
6. CalDav calendar support (also a must for me!)
7. Notes sync

There’s more, but that’s all the cool stuff. Did Apple forget the devs? Nope. We get a lot of cool new toys too, some of which would have been nice a month ago when return7 started work on its next app (currently in beta):

1. Proximity sensor API (yay! we can be hot shots like google now and boy do I have a kick ass app idea using this)
2. Peer-to-peer discovery/ip connection ala bluetooth+bonjour (it’s 1-to-1, not n-n)
3. Accessories can access the dock connector or hit the phone via bluetooth — can dream up so many cool robots w/ this now
4. Google maps API (can’t be used for turn-by-turn)
5. Official blessing for turn-by-turn (Garmin, give us some love..please!)  but bring your own maps
6. PUSH NOTIFICATIONS! Hi, welcome to not September 2008. Better late than never, though. I must say, I prefer either backgrounding or some runner that calls some standalone script in an app that’s limited to 10 seconds or so of execution time…but this’ll do.
7. VOIP Service of some sort for apps (not sure how this’ll work but here come the 10 million walkie-talkie apps..they’ll be the new ToDo app)
8. Access to the music library on the phone
9. Easier audio recording
10. Upsell on paid apps (basically makes it easy to do things like episodic content for users)

Once again, there’s more, but those are the highlights. Did I get all of the answers I wanted or everything I wanted? No. Did I expect to? Not so much. I think Apple’s done a pretty good job of appeasing the fanboi (and the !fanboi) in me, though. Will be excited when/if they announce a new iPhone later this year.

Edit: give me tethering.