Apple iPhone 2.0

With the iPhone 3G releasing in July 11th in 22 countries worldwide, the New Zealanders were the first to sell the iPhone 3G. The website ifixit.com sent one of their own to NZ to purchase and disassemble a 3G iPhone to provide photos for a first look feature. In Spain, Telefonica already has 200,000 preorders, and in the cellphone sophisticated Japan, over 800 people waited in line, some overnight in sleeping bags. One of the interesting things about the Japanese cellphone market is that the iPhone is missing two features which are common in Japanese cellphones: the ability to watch broadcast television, and the electronic wallet payment system.

Yesterday evening, following dinner, we walked by the Apple Store in Palo Alto, and campers had already set up shop, with sleeping bags and Guitar Hero.

I setup the firmware 2.0 update for my iPhone and started looking at the new Apps on the iTunes Apps Store. I'm impressed by the creativity of some of the developers -- not only are there tools for everything you'd expect (Twitter, AIM, Flickr, Facebook, Pandora), but there are also Apps that seem very usable (such as the iLingo foreign language conversation books). What I haven't been impressed with are the developers who put public domain works on the Apps store for a fee (For instance, Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a $0.99 program). For many of the mobile indie games, more information is required than just a screenshot.

One of the more useful apps that's free is the "Remote" program put out by Apple -- which allows you to control your AppleTV or iTunes from the iPhone, effectively turning your iPhone into a WiFi remote control. The Google Mobile App is also very useful, as it attempts to predict which word you are typing in, which speeds up the input dramatically when googling a longer query.

I've been sitting on the fence about upgrading to the 3G iPhone; while EDGE is certainly slower, the price difference for the new 3G plan is more expensive than the original iPhone plan (about $360 more over the length of the 2 year contract), it doesn't feel enough of an upgrade to warrant the expenditure for the moment. That said, 2.0 firmware and the Apps store is a major upgrade to the 1.1.4 firmware.