Initial thoughts on iPhone 3G

Today Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPhone during his keynote at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.  Overall I was very happy with the news,  particularly with the confirmation that Australia is one of the 22 countries it will be released to on July 11.  The announcement about on board GPS is the most important to me.  I can’t wait for geotagging, and getting directions on the road.  Tom Tom manufacturers must be very worried right now.  The third party application demos were extremely cool, and a distribution model that takes higher education settings into account is a very welcome. I’m also personally very happy that they will be improving VPN and Exchange capabilities with the new firmware, because that’s going to make a significant difference to me at my workplace.

There were a few disappointments for me however.  The fact that there is still no 32Gb version was a surprise.  I realise that it’s because of the importance they are putting on affordability, but 16Gb is not really a lot when you start using video, photos and music on a regular basis.  The iPhone isn’t just another smart phone, it’s a new category of device.  I’m also disappointed there’s no news on pricing in Australia, but I remain hopeful that it will be in line with the US. The most troubling thing is that there has been no announcement from Apple Australia about purchasing the iPhone outright, which makes me think that the phones will be tied to contracts as they have been elsewhere to date.  But again, I’ll wait and see.  There was also one other thing I expected to see in the iPhone 2.0 firmware that wasn’t mentioned:  support for Macromedia Flash.  This seems overdue.