Byrnesys Blabberings

Well, I knew it would be more of a surprise if they didnt release a 3G iPhone than if they did, but somehow whilst reading through the coverage today I am still very excited!

Here are what I think are the big additions from last nights keynote (which can be read in full here) 

• New iPhone Operating system called iPhone 2.0 with PUSH service for emails etc (eg. Blackberry replacement!)
  
• The well covered 3rd party applications will soon be available, which is likely to introduce some pretty incredible tools for the iPhone, ebay, typepad showed off some pretty uninteresting apps, but Im sure there is some serious software goodness on its way!
• MobileMe the (long overdue) replacement for dot mac has arrived and looks completely amazing! Check it out at http://www.apple.com/mobileme/ "MobileMe stores your info up in the cloud so you can get to it anywhere using any of your devices — Mac, PC, iPhone — it will push information up and down to keep everything up to date all the time. Example of email — gets pushed down to all devices. Change a contact? Gets pushed up to MobileMe, down to all other device. "The best part of this, it works over the air. Everything is up to date."
• Mobile me also includes an incredible web based interface at me.com which runs on so much ajax it really looks like an apple desktop! - "It’s available for $99 per year — 20GB of storage."
• The New iPhone is of course 3G, but also includes enterprise, GPS and apps store:
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• More affordable was obviously the thing I was most interested in. Apple has aligned itself with the rest of the mobile market by offsetting the cost of the phone with contracts, it is now listed with o2 in the UK as free on the £45 and £75 per month contracts.
• the iPhone will be available from the 11th of July, with an option of free upgrade for those nervous 1st Generation iPhone users I mentioned yesterday.
• iPhone will be rolled out into more countries, this is great for the international roaming problem I hypothesized about a while ago. In relation to that, UK network O2 will be offering the phone without contract which means as long as other networks follow suit you could switch the ‘Pay As You Go’ sim cards for each country you are in!
  

This is all great, though I was also hoping for:

• Front facing camera for video calls and skype!
• Increase in storage, 8GB is going to fill up pretty fast with all those apps, emails etc, where will the music filling my 30GB iPod go? I was at least expecting a 32GB iPhone if not a 120GB iPod Touch.
  

I think broadly speaking, the inter-relatedness of the push service will see the iPhone move into the business market a little more adding substance to style, I would also suspect that thanks to the more accesible pricing system, iPhones will take off in a way we haven’t seen in Europe so far.

Do you have any thoughts on what you would have like to see? Will the massive price reduction make you think twice before writing off the iPhone as a competitor for your next upgrade?

UPDATE: Apple Video of the Steve Jobs iPhone Keynote here