Looking back at my post after the first iPhone was announced, it’s quite suprising how many of the predictions about the second iPhone were actually realised. Of course when I wrote it, it wasn’t just a matter of guess what would be improved but also a wish list of things I’d have liked to see before actually buying one.
I said the iPhone 2.0 would:
- be released 1.5 years after the first - Well that seemed about right.
- have 3G - Ok I predicted this would be in the European version. Obviously Apple had more trouble than most phone makers in getting us this feature.
- be smaller - Ok so the 3G is actually slightly thicker but without the metal back manages to be 2g lighter. It would still be nice if it could fit in your pocket though.
- have all the same features - A slight underestimation here. This was based on my reasoning that Apple would be quickly bringing out a version that fixes all the problems with the old one rather than spending money on new features. Of course the price was the big thing that Apple admitted put a lot of people off - especially outside the US. I also reasoned that they’d want to leave some features for the next generation of their phone rather than do they very best they possibly could right away.
- have longer battery life - One thing Apple came through on. Somehow they managed to squeeze more life out of it despite the addition of 3G which is a known battery killer. I suspect that extra width went mostly into a bigger battery.
- have more memory - Well we didn’t have to wait for the 3G version for this. They doubled the initial max capacity from 8GB to 16GB back in February this year.
- a slightly better camera (maybe with an led flash) - Clearly I underestimated the importance to most people of a decent camera on their phone. It would be nice to have but clearly people are not planning to use it replace their digital point and shoots.
- have more custom iPhone internet applications - This was a big focus during the annoucement of the 3G. The SDK is looking very interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing what people will come up with with the new hardware.
- have reasonable prices for unlimited mobile internet access - I still haven’t seen as much response from phone networks about this point as I’d expected. The unlimited data plans are still pretty dear (about £7.50 / month if I’m not mistaken). Still we’re moving in the right direction.
- get an overall price reduction - Apple claims to have made big improvements here by dropping the cost of the initial phone but are actually increasing the overall cost by increasing the data plan costs.
And the biggest improvement that I didn’t expect at all (and I don’t think anyone else did either) is of course A-GPS. I told myself I’d get the phone as soon as they added GPS and now that they have, well, I’m still not going to get one. The monthly plan prices are still way too much (3 times what I’m currently paying). The good thing about these announcements is that a lot more people I know will be getting one now which will give me a chance to play around with it and see what I think. Roll on July 11th!