Well, in about a year, this post will seem dated, but today, Apple announced a new iPhone, called iPhone 3GS, along with iPhone OS 3.0, due to ship the 19th and 17th of June, respectively.
What does the iPhone 3GS add? 3 MP camera, up from 2. Voice commands. A compass for use with Google Maps. Video recording. And about 15-20% better battery life... to mention the salients.
It is, mind you, the same form factor as the iPhone 3G. Some modest and welcome upgrades for sure, but the real pudding is in iPhone OS 3.0, which will speed everything up and add tons more features, like MMS.
I am excited about all this. What I think most of us want is a front facing video camera for video conferencing and a built in PICO projector for projecting a high def image up on a wall. If the iPhone ended up with these latter 2 features, and managed to increase the speed and ram, I think we would truly be in the Star Trek era.
As a footnote, too bad the MacBook Pros, save for the 17", lost their ExpressCard slots. But wow on the price drops and wow on the $29 US price for the Snow Leopard upgrade if you are already an existing Leopard user. I think Apple is now pretty much stuck at selling them for these lower prices. Shotty economy = + for consumers.
For all the complaints out there about the camera still not being high resolution enough, and the fact that it does not have a front facing video camera... those two features kill battery life. Once you start snapping pictures at 5 MP, the battery drains much faster. It just is not worth it to Apple to sacrifice so much battery life... and hurts the user experience, and, in the end, if you really want to take good pics, use a real point and shoot camera or a professional one. So I remain patient on these fronts, because battery technology has to advance a bit more before we can expect Apple to build in higher res cameras and a front facing video camera.
Case in point. When the first iPhone came out in the summer of 07, I was also looking at Nokia's N80 (I think that is the model). It was their flagship phone, with a 5.x MP camera built in. Funny enough, I saw a whole boatload of them on Craigslist locally from people trying to sell them and buy an iPhone. One of the biggest complaints was battery life. Take even a modest number of pictures and don't expect much more than about 1 hour of talk time after the shots have been taken.
But aside from battery life, imagine the network clogging traffic if every iPhone could video conference... even if they could build it in, and I am sure they have a prototype that has one, I am sure the Network providers are not set up for that kind of payload... yet.
Ryan
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Received on Mon Jun 8 17:21:49 2009
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