iPhone 3.0, what to expect, maybe

If you cast your mind back to January, Macworld came and went with absolutely nothing for iPhone users to get excited about. The Apple keynote finished with Tony Bennett singing “The best is yet to come”, well hopefully on Tuesday 17th March 2009 we will, at last find out what that “Best” is.

There have been many posts over the last few days predicting what we can expect from the 3.0 Firmware and this picture above sums things up nicely. Apple have to start filling in the blanks of normal functionality, the Palm Pre which in my opinion has pushed Apple to do this, has all of these features out of the box with the exception of a changeable memory card which when you have 16 gigs of storage onboard is not really an issue anyway for iPhone users.

Software

So looking at the 3.0 software side of the announcement, we need to see MMS, Video Recording ability and for the hell of it tethering by Bluetooth, we pay the Carriers enough for data and the casual use of your iPhone as a modem to your laptop is not exactly a new thing and should be available to us.

Copy and paste between applications is also an important missing feature that while not critical to everyday use can make the whole experience better. How hard can it be to implement.

The ability to multi-task, we know that running lots of background applications together will slow the device down but give us the option of a couple of applications, how great would it be to have your IM client running all the time in the background and cut back on quitting and loading applications all the time, drives me mad.

The home screen needs some love too, give us category icons instead of pages and pages of applications, click a Games icon and your games page appears, hey what a great idea, makes sense then you only have one home screen and no swiping around looking for applications.

Finally the lock screen, turn on your phone and you get a notification of text messages a clock and that’s about it, what a waste of space. Add onto that email, a few lines of any new mail, upcoming appointments, hell even the weather for the next few hours would be great.

Hardware

Lots of predictions for an iPhone Nano but not here, this does not fit with the iPhone ecosystem of a touchscreen easy use device, a Nano iPhone would make everything too small and would be a backward step. Instead maybe one new model being added to the family, an iPhone with a higher resolution screen, more memory and a faster processor. Front facing camera for video conferencing and available in 16 Gig and 32 Gig flavours.

The camera will be stepped up but only to 3.2Mpx but an improvement all the same and the battery will stay as a fixed non removable battery, it’s Apple thing right.

Picture Source Journaldugeek