This is a summary e-mail I sent yesterday to a few executives and friends who wanted my opinion on the new Apple announcements. I felt that the mobile blogging we did as well as the assessment after the keynote was enough, but after reading this I think there may be a few good tidbits and insight. This isn’t just a rehash of what happened, it is also sprinkled with a few of my opinions. Yes, I know it looks like a novel, but it really is a summary. Be glad I didn’t go in to detail! Enjoy.
No surprise but the iPhone 3G was announced. 8GB for $199 and 16GB for $299. To put that in perspective, the original pricepoint of the 8GB iPhone was $599 which was then very shortly cut to $399. So even the new high-end 3G phone is $100.00 less than the old 8GB iPhone. Awesome except that the price is subsidized. In the end this means that the special treatment that Apple got from AT&T is over. Dead. Gone. Oh Apple is still exclusive to AT&T in the U.S. though, but in part because there is no other good GSM carrier with a 3G network (Verizon and Sprint are CDMA and T-Mobile in the US has no good 3G which leaves AT&T). Apple almost needs AT&T more than AT&T needs Apple. Then again, how hard is it to really build a CDMA version? Sprint could use the help of the iPhone right about now and had better be pounding on Apple’s door.
Battery life seems to be OK, 5 hours on a 3G network connection which is a few hours more than what you can get with other devices today, but still no replaceable battery (doubt they will do that any time soon). Devices like the N95 can get better battery life with an extended battery, an option that is not available for the iPhone… yet… 24 hours of music playback, 7 hours of video playback, 10 hours of 2G access (EDGE), 10 hours talk time and 300 hours of standby time. Make sure to have a charger nearby if you’re going to be living on 3G. Consider investing in iPhone battery companies who find clever ways to add an additional battery to the iPhone without turning it in to a brick… Assuming we can find such a creature.
The iPhone 3G will be shipping July 11th (whaaaa?????)Â That means that Apple will have been out of inventory of the iPhone for 3 months before they had a product they can ship. This will hurt their sales over these last 3 months since no one (or at least hardly anyone) has been able to buy an iPhone for 2 months now and we STILL have to wait another month before we can get one.
The new iPhone 3G has an all plastic back which I believe will help with reception. I don’t think they talked about that in the keynote, but metal + radio signals = badness. This is actually a good thing and I’m excited that they decided to move to plastics.
There is an actual GPS chipset in there now which will get us much more accurate location information. More importantly it can track with you now, so it could be used for driving directions. When watching all of the 3rd party app demos that were up on stage, a vast majority of them had location awareness built in to their application in some way. Location aware devices and applications are the next big thing here. It’s gunna be HUGE! Watch this space closely, I believe this will be the next big leap in social networking and frankly mobile apps in general.
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