New iPhone Announced Monday0

Apple’s amazing iPhone has pushed the competition to develop products to keep up with it. Unlike the American auto industry, competitors have reacted to Apple eating up market share and have since turned out products like the Palm Pre, Blackberry Storm and the HTC Touch Pro 2 in an effort to meet consumers’ wants and needs. It is difficult to compete with the original innovation that is the iPhone, which is the benchmark. Companies have been forced to get innovative, and do so as best they can. They aren’t selling as well, but they aren’t in need of government bailouts, either.

The next version (3) of the iPhone will be unveiled Monday, June 8th at WWDC… and as you can see from the hero image above, not a moment too soon!

It seems that as soon as a competitor manages to get some momentum, Apple kicks it up a notch. I think that this is how it goes down. The iPhone entered the market, and this phone was developed for everybody… as long as you’re not a hardcore business-type. Several existing technologies came together into one new technology, and any shortcomings were overshadowed by the sheer size of this convergence. For the second round, some of these shortcomings were addressed and marketed as new features. The wireless was faster, reception better and several office-standard technologies like VPN, document viewing and Exchange were added. The IT managers could join the party. (That is how an office goes from company-issued Blackberries to company-issued iPhones.) This time around, the phone will be able to do what most other phones already do, like MMS, cut-n-paste, taking videos, and voice recording. The hardware will be beefier in terms of clock speed and memory, so it will be able to do everything it already does better, as well as (reportedly) do it on less power. This should reel in the rest of the naysayers, providing there isn’t some catastrophic hardware failure that makes them start on fire or something terrible.

So far, from everybody I talk to, the biggest issue with the iPhone isn’t the iPhone itself, but the service that it’s tethered to. That is why I could sell a first-generation iPhone for $300 on eBay so somebody can take and unlock it for use on T-Mobile. Rumors are brewing though, that the iPhone could be on the way to other networks. I think that it goes without saying that the sales for iPhone could double if this happened. For now though, cracking the software is the only way to go.

On a side note, once the new hardware is out, I will finally crack open the iPhone developer’s kit and learn to make applications. There is a very specific, very annoying sector of iPhone users that I like to call the Wait-I-have-an-app-for-that crowd. These are the same people that if this was the Wild West, they would be causing and winning all of the quickdraw gunfights. These people can go from empty handed to a specific app like a magician… if there was an app to release a puff of smoke to illustrate this point, they would have it.

Hmm. I’m going to write that down. (Using the accelerometer, it could detect the movement from vertical position in the pocket to horizontal and relatively motionless… could fire off a gunshot sound and display the draw time to see who was faster… endless hours of d-baggy fun! Genius!!)

The new 3.0 software update is supposed to consider an App rating system. The fart-button app that is out has proven to me that people will pay for anything. So, when this software-based parental lockout system happens, I will be able to develop a shameless money-making bikini screen washer application. Somebody just did it already, and it stinks. I’m a little peeved because somebody stole my idea. The App Store is the new California Gold Rush… and I am more than happy to contribute my fair-share of shameless, useless crap if it’ll get me some gold dust. :)