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.

Some cool stuff came out of Apple today.

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?????)  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.

The iPhone 3G will be in 70 countries soon.  By July 11th it will be in Canada for both English and French as well as the US.  To see a full list of countries that Apple will be selling the iPhone in, go here:  http://www.apple.com/iphone/countries/  This is one of the many reasons Apple went with GSM rather than CDMA and I highly doubt we’ll see them move any time soon (too bad for Sprint, but keep pounding on that door guys!)

You can watch the new iPhone ad here:  http://www.apple.com/iphone/gallery/ads/hallway/

One thing that really sucks is that Apple no longer gets special treatment from AT&T. This means that the completely automated way that one could activate their phone is in essence dead. The iTunes activation feature was brilliant and I think was one of the three most forward looking aspects of the iPhone (the others being visual voicemail and multi-touch itself). One may still be able to activate via iTunes, but unlocking all features and getting the $199 advertised price will almost certainly require an AT&T or Apple rep of sorts. Stupid contract stuff no one likes to do. Imagine what the lines will look like when the iPhone 3G comes out and the headache one will have to go through to activate the iPhone with AT&T. One of things I really liked about the iPhone was the fact that I only had to deal with Apple who I knew would treat me right and I rarely if ever had to touch AT&T who I was pretty sure would do anything they could to screw me over. AT&T had better seriously step up their customer service or they are going to see a backlash and that could harm Apple in the long run as well.

MobileMe was announced.  This is the refresh to the aging .Mac system.  20GB of online storage and basically a consumer version of Exchange.  MobileMe offers push e-mail, contacts and calendar to all of your Macs, PCs and iPhones.  In addition it has a very sexy AJAX powered web interface with e-mail, calendar, contacts, iDisk, etc.  Make a change on any device and it will push to the cloud and back to the other devices.  Make a change in the cloud and it will go back down to the computers and devices.  Same price as the old .Mac system which is $99.00/yr and I assume they will still have a 5 user family pack at $150.00/yr.  http://www.apple.com/mobileme/guidedtour/ has a fairly nice walkthrough. Yup, called this one the moment they announced Exchange support for the iPhone… I also predicted they will build many of the push services in to Mac OS X server, atop their own platforms. This has not happened yet but a new OS called Snow Leopard was announced and I assume there is an OS X Server equivalent of that as well. I expect to see push like services in Snow Leopard Server.

What DIDN’T happen today:
- No 32GB iPhone
- No iPhone (PRODUCT)RED
- No videoconferencing on the iPhone (awwww)
- No tablet device

What DID happen today:
- Microsoft wet themselves
- RIM wet themselves… twice…
- Palm just gave up
- Nokia still doesn’t care

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This sounds like a case of “just following orders” but clearly the order need to be changed.

A family who’s house was destroyed this week in the fires near San Diego, California is being charged by AT&T for the loss of their satellite dish receiver.

Imagine fire fighters coming into neighborhoods trying to get people to evacuate only to find them on ladders unscrewing the receiver attached to their houses. I don’t think that’s the type of behavior we’d like to see in this type of situation:

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This sounds like a case of “just following orders” but clearly the order need to be changed.

A family who’s house was destroyed this week in the fires near San Diego, California is being charged by AT&T for the loss of their satellite dish receiver.

Imagine fire fighters coming into neighborhoods trying to get people to evacuate only to find them on ladders unscrewing the receiver attached to their houses. I don’t think that’s the type of behavior we’d like to see in this type of situation:

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One thing that’s really annoying about buying a cell phone these days is figuring out whether it’s compatible with your wireless provider. For example, Apple has fired up the masses with new iPhone, but it’s only going to be available on Cingular/AT&T.

Consumers will have to decide whether the phone drives their contract, or whether their contract (together with service and coverage) drives which phones they’ll consider purchasing.

In an attempt to reduce the complexity of the decision (for now), here is a matrix of which smartphones are available on each major US wireless provider. I’ve limited the list to smartphones because, frankly, that’s all that interests me. The phones are not ranked in any particular order other than some loose grouping by manufacturer.