The 3G iPhone - I was right
$200 for 8 gig with 2 year contract from AT&T. The only significant additions over last version in terms of hardware are the 3G antenna and GPS. The 3G is visually very similar to the original iPhone. It’s slightly thicker and has an all-plastic back, in your choice of white or black. Overall, this is probably the same crap you’ve seen all over the internet in the past few hours.
The iPhone 2.0 firmware will be free for all current iPhone users, but will be a $10 upgrade for iPod Touch users. Paying for firmware updates? Come on Steve Jobs! This is America! This is the twenty-first century! We might as well revert to monarchy and an aristocratic caste system if the commoners must pay for their firmware updates!
Sure, one could argue that the 2.0 firmware update adds many capabilities for the Touch and the iPhone, but just look at the Samsung P2 and its Blue Wave firmware updates. The Blue Wave updates have given the P2 its fair share of new features FOR FREE: bluetooth connectivity with phones, bluetooth file transfers, a dictionary, improved video functions , and many others. (btw, someone in my family owns the P2 and I can vouch that its screen is significantly prettier than that of the iPhone.)
What I would really like to see on the iPhone is increased codec support. I’m sure people are tired of converting all of their videos to tiny resolution MPEG-4. No matter how convenient it is to have iTunes automatically convert every video in your library, it still takes time and takes away from the portability if you can’t simply drag and drop your videos on a whim. Surely the almighty iPhone has enough power to downscale 800×480 Xvid files in AVI containers.
Still, it wouldn’t be right to discount the addition of 3G to the iPhone. One of the biggest complaints about the original iPhone was that the EDGE network was freakin’ slow. The addition of an SDK in firmware 2.0 is certainly welcome because we’ll begin to see an influx of useful third-party programs that will allow the user to unlock the potential of the iPhone without jailbreaking it and putting his warranty at risk.