http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/06/16/iphone-killers-gird-their-loins-for-battle

As the launch of the 3G iPhone approaches, BusinessWeek reports that competitors face the same problem they did in July of last year.

“Most people want the iPhone, just as they want the iPod and not some other MP3 player,” says Gloria Barczak, professor of marketing at Northeastern University. “People want the real thing.” 

At worst, Gizmodo lambastes web browsing on the Instinct as an “ABYSMAL failure of design.” 

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html

“When you’re young, you look at television and think, ‘There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down.’ But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

The two big announcements for WWDC 08 were the new iPhone 3G and Snow Leopard, but if you only paid attention to the keynote, iPhone 3G was the only thing new.  The first half of the keynote was about the new iPhone 2.0 firmware, but most of what was said was already covered back at the iPhone SDK Roadmap event.  Clearly the big deal Monday was what everyone knew was coming — iPhone 3G.

I P H O N E    3 G

Physically, it’s very similar to the first iPhone, and if you only saw or interacted with the front, it’s almost identical.  The back is now plastic (choice of black or white) and the buttons are metal.  The body shape is tapered similar to the MacBook Air, and the headphone jack is no longer recessed.  Other than that, the thing looks the same.  Still the same camera, home button, sensors, speakers and mic.

Internally the iPhone has bands for 3G, EDGE, GSM, WiFi, and now GPS.  The iPhone’s location awareness framework CoreLocation can use the GPS chip, or WiFi access points or cellular triangulation like before.  There’s not much more to say than that.  Apple delivered on the two most requested features, and left out the rest.  I admit I was half expecting a frontward camera for video conferencing, but does it really make that much sense?  The bandwidth usage would be huge and the performance would almost surely suffer.

Beyond the minor case redesign and internal upgrades, the major news is that the iPhone is now roughly half the price.  $199 for the 8GB and $299 for the 16GB, it’s hard to justify paying any amount of money for any other smartphone on the market.  The downside to that is that the AT&T plan is $10 higher per month and that contract is rumored to be much more heavily enforced.  Word around AT&T memos is that customers will be required to sign contracts in Apple or AT&T stores (no more online ordering) and — while you’ll still be able to activate it yourself at home — there is an as yet unknown penalty for customers who don’t activate within 30 days.  A huge number of Apple orders come from online customers, especially given how many people don’t live anywhere near an Apple Store.  But maybe the idea is to get those people into an Apple Store even just once, to try sell more to them?  Given how wrong information from AT&T was when the iPhone was first released, it’s probably better to wait and see at this point.

S N O W    L E O P A R D

The other news from WWDC 08 is Snow Leopard, the quality-focused next update to Mac OS X* which will officially be numbered 10.6.  It takes courage for a major company like Apple to announce that the next retail release of their operating system won’t contain any significant end-user features.  It will be interesting to see how it’s marketed and sold, whether it will be full price or get a marketing campaign at all.  It should be even more interesting to see the public reaction to the very strong rumor that PPC support will be dropped entirely.  There’s plenty to get excited about just from the small blurb on the site (ZFS, OpenCL, QuickTime X**), but I don’t expect users who bought a PowerMac G5 or Xserve G5 cluster 2 years ago are going to be happy at all.  As much as the iPhone firmware 2.0 appeals to the enterprise market, dropping OS support for 3 year old (Snow Leopard is scheduled for next year) hardware is not going to go over well, no matter how good the reason.  And it’s a reason I agree with 100%.

* Like the speculated banners at WWDC, the Snow Leopard pages first said “OS X Leopard” before being replaced by “Mac OS X Leopard.”

** QuickTime 7.5 is the current version.  Will there be an 8 or a 9 by the time X is out?  Or are we to treat the X in QuickTime X the same way we treat the X in Mac OS X?