iPhone 3G: Ho hum

Well, was that it? And didn't Jobs look thin? I mean ill thin

Apple announce the features that should have been in iPhone from the start, like 3G and GPS and utterly fail to mention the continued crapness of the 2Mpixel camera. Yes, alright, we already know it does web browsing. Wow. There's only so much hype you can swallow at one go. By far the most impressive thing on show was Moo Cow Music's Band, which was a fantastic bit of app fun. Some of the apps were pretty good actually, but I'm not sure we needed to see it all in that much detail. I suspect a severe case of padding a thin keynote, because, let's be honest, there wasn't really anything else to see. Still, actually putting decent wireless networking in was nice, so it'll work with WPA2.0 nicely.

It just seems that the idea that there is a world outside the US is slowing permeating into the heads of the guys at Apple. But it's still glacial in its pace. Having said that, the competition in Europe and Japan is hot, with hardware manufacturers not standing still. I'd suspect that Nokia and SonyEricsson are hardly quaking in their boots. And, of course, Apple are masters of the vertical product chain, so their sync services are looking good (but then you'd hope so in a demo, wouldn't you?).

Probably the most interesting issue is the price point. It looks like Apple have bitten the bullet a little and realised, especially in Europe, that the pricing model they were using was not one designed to move them inot mass market. Even now though, limiting iPhone officially to O2 isn't helping. At the new pricing I would consider one on my network (3), but I'm not switching to O2 to own a new toy and risk making myself a new brick at first upgrade.

Don't get me wrong, I like Apple kit and use it a lot. But that doesn't make me a rabid Apple fanboy. This announcement doesn't excite me particularly and all of the US hoopla surrounding it strikes me as rather unworldly and disproportionate; what they have for Europe is still just a reasonable spec phone that wins on UI (probably the big selling point of the device). nothing more. It certainly hasn't changed the phone landscape here like it may have done in the US.

All things considered I think I'll pass for now.