Apple WWDC announcements

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Mon, Jun 08 2009 | 0 Comments

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference left a lot to be desired with the announcement of the iPhone 3G S. Where everyone was expecting something “revolutionary,” they were left with something that was simply “evolutionary.”

The newest addition to iPhone lineup, the 3G S is simply the iPhone 3G with a 3 megapixel camera, a faster processor, and the 3.0 software. Data speeds for the 3G S have been increased to 7.2Mbps HSDPA. Apple also finally added video recording abilities to the iPhone and at 30 frames per second, they’re pretty good. It will also have multimedia messaging.

One of my favorite features is the new fingerprint resistant coating on the phones…I have always been angry at the amount of fingerprints my phone accumulates over the course of 5 minutes. Right now my Pre is a smudge magnet.

The price points were nice announcements, with the 16 GB version running $199 and the 32 GB at $299. They will also keep selling the iPhone 3G (the 3.0 software can be downloaded for free for these phones) at $99. That’s for a non-refurbished phone. I believe that the price points were set to put some pressure on Palm after setting the price of the Pre at $199 after a $100 mail in rebate. The new iPhones will be on sale starting June 19th.

Another announcement regarding the iPhone is the new ability to tether the phone to a computer for data usage. While at first At&t wasn’t announced as one of the carriers to allow tethering, later the company issued a statement saying that it would allow tethering.

One thing that happened at the conference today that was a bit annoying was their depiction of the number of apps the Apple App store has versus other companies. Sure, Apple has over 50,000 apps in the store, why would they compare it to Palm, who JUST launched its App Catalog on Saturday. They gave palm 2 days and all Palm has to offer at the time the presentation was made was 18 apps. Well, while browsing my App Catalog yesterday afternoon, I can tell you that there were 25 apps as of Monday night.

Aside from the iPhone, Apple also announced new Mac Books with non-removable batteries. While this goes along with every other offering from the company like iPods and iPhones, this is a bad idea in my opinion. It never takes long for a laptop to start losing overall battery life and everyone already knows how expensive it is to send an iPod to Apple for new batteries…imagine how much it will cost for a battery for a laptop! Plus, you will be without your laptop for however long it takes to get back to you.

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Note to Apple: It would be nice to be able to pick any app we’d like

Tags: megapixel camera, software data, iphone