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Now that the iPhone 3G has been officially announced and the details have been released, we are holding the first ever: TiPb vs TiPb. In the two articles we will detail reasons why we SHOULD upgrade and why we SHOULDN’T upgrade to the iPhone 3G. No hard feelings, No blood spilled, just good old fashioned point-by-point debate.

My first computer was an Apple II. Sure, I flirted with DOS (KDS 7860!), then had a fling with an Amiga before falling in with Windows 3.1 through Vista (now tucked safely away in a VM). But even in the Dark Days, I had a Mac Performa for a while, and now for the last year, I’m back on Mac full time. I say this to show that I don’t believe in being loyal to company that just sees me as cash. I believe in a company being loyal to me if they want my cash. They have to earn it. And the moment another company, platform, car manufacturer, game system developer, or cola maker does a better, more innovative job earning my cash — they get it.

So, for me, just because Apple released a new iPhone didn’t mean they “had me at 3G”. If they wanted my cash (and my enslavement to a carrier — more on that later), they had to wow me.

And wow me they did.

Read on the top 5 reasons you SO need to upgrade!

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Now that the iPhone 3G has been officially announced and the details have been released, we are holding the first ever: TiPb vs TiPb. In the two articles we will detail reasons why we SHOULD upgrade and why we SHOULDN’T upgrade to the iPhone 3G. No hard feelings, No blood spilled, just good old fashioned point-by-point debate.

More so than any other Apple release, the iPhone 3G was probably the worst kept secret in the history of Apple. There was plenty of speculation, some wild (video conferencing) and some tame (black casing). Some were right, some were wrong.

I flagrantly participated in the rumorpalooza. I was excited for every nugget of news even though it didn’t contain a kernel of truth. So maybe I hyped myself into thinking the iPhone 3G was going to be the be all, end all device that the iPhone was. After my initial excitement subsided, I realized, hey, the iPhone 3G isn’t a necessary upgrade! I could wait a little until all the kinks are worked out, so these are the 5 Reasons Why I’m NOT Upgrading to the iPhone 3G.

Read on for the 5 Reasons to NOT upgrade!

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Out of the closest iPhone lover and WinSuperSite maven Paul Thurrott once again proved a picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to just some of the complaints TiPb and our readers have leveled at the new MobileMe branding.

Particularly poignant, coming from the man behind the site in front of Windows, the above logos show how linking The Next Big Thing to The Last (Before Vista) Big Flop maybe wasn’t the best marketing discussion in the world.

In related news, what does Thurrott think of the new iPhone 3G?

I’d like to point out a simple bit of advice, and I cannot stress this enough: You need to get an iPhone. Sooner rather than later. With Apple dropping the entry price on this innovative device to just $200, while fixing all of the major issues I described in How Apple Can Fix the iPhone in 2008, there are precious few reasons to ignore this seismic shift in mobile and cloud computing. (One potential reason is the cost of the data plan: It looks like the minimum monthly outlay for an iPhone in the US is going to be $70 before taxes, about $10 more than it was before.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The iPhone is a dramatically important computing platform and one you should not ignore. Trust me, once you’ve used an iPhone, that Blackberry or Windows Mobile device you’re settling on now will seem like ancient Soviet-era technology by comparison.

Warning: We may get medium-geeky here for moment. Adjust your pocket-protectors accordingly.

Apple is using the iPhone to crack their way into the enterprise. No big surprise there. What is surprising, however, is just how Sun Tzu their being about it. How so?

Bottom line, for an end-user, the interface is the app. Sure, we recognize names like Exchange, ActiveSync, even BES, but for most typical users, firing up Outlook or switching on their Blackberry IS their email. They don’t see what’s going on programmatically behind the scenes, don’t care what protocol is hand-shaking and packetizing their data as it zips from server to server in its chaotic relay from sender to receiver. They just see their email, and they just know that it was there when they needed it.

Given that, Apple licensing Exchange ActiveSync becomes more than just interesting. Why? Because they didn’t buy Outlook. They’re making their own MobileMail app which will seamlessly handle Exchange, but, oh by the way, will also handle MobileMe (the new .Mac refresh already billed as Exchange for the rest of us), as well as the usual Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.

So, for the end user, ActiveSync disappears behind the MobileMail iPhone interface. And if they have a home account, be it MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo!, or whatever, the differences become less and less apparent (especially as push-like technologies propagate the different services), and in the end, ActiveSync disappears and people just think of their MobileMail app.

Meanwhile, the technologies behind MobileMail, with the advent of Snow Leopard Server, get more interesting, especially with Apple offering open, standards-based protocols like IMAP IDLE, and developing and releasing to the Open Source community similar code like CalDAV for push calendar and now, CardDAV for push contacts.

All of a sudden, a business could run an Exchange-like server without any Microsoft like licensing fees (which anyone who has dealt with them can tell you are money trap unto themselves).

Most interesting of all, if a business had deployed iPhones and they decided to switch from Exchange to Snow Leopard (or any *nix server using the FOSS implementations on their own), their end users may not even notice.

Roughly Drafted has more on Snow Leopard and its possible implications for Exchange/SharePoint users.

Here at TiPb we’ve covered 10 things we thought Apple needed to fix in the next iPhone. With the anticipation of the iPhone 3G, the rumor mill went crazy with things like video conferencing, different models, etc. all but confirmed at one point in time. We even ran a bunch of our own predictions.

And well the Jobsnote was yesterday, and though we got the biggies: 3G, GPS, flush headphone jack, and a $199 price point, but we also missed out on a lot of stuff we thought we would be getting already.

Read on to see what we didn’t get in the iPhone 3G!

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Read that title again, and realize that the iPhone 3G will sell for LESS than the infamous price drop given the original iPhone before the holidays. (Recap: it’s started at $599 and was dropped to $399 with early adapters getting an equally infamous $100 Apple Store gift certificate Jobs-a-culpa).

And while the price drop was big news then, the retail price of $199 should be HUGE news today.

At $199, that’s HALF the price of the original iPhone at its lowest. It’s the SAME price as an 8GB iPod Nano. It’s LESS than an iPod Classic, and MUCH LESS than an iPod Touch!

When we consider the possibility of carrier subsidies on top of that (Europe has been heavily rumored, with Orange at the extreme gossipy end of giving them away free to current iPhone owners), the iPhone may just be cheaper than “competing” Blackberries, Windows Mobile, and Treo smart phones.

Profit margins (averaging 30%) on hardware have historically been Apple’s bread and butter, but this isn’t the personal computer market (where they’re a founding name) or the MP3 player market (where they have a dominant market share already), this is a much bigger, much less saturated market for Apple. Consumers will buy for a variety of reasons. Features often tops the list. Fashion certainly plays its part. But price can be the difference between dream and reality for a lot of shoppers.

Apple knows this, and they’ve developed an unparalleled 360 degree, spherically integrated business model to support it. A share of App Store sales and MobileMe subscriptions are just two examples surfaced today. Apple Retail Store profits, accessories, Mac hardware, licensing fees, iTunes sales, and a host of other factors let them maintain profitability while minimizing sticker shot for their users.

Steve Jobs once said that the mistake made by the management prior to his return was to go for money rather than market share. By keeping high prices in the present, they all but killed the platform’s future.

Judging by today’s WWDC 2008 Keynote, Jobs learned that lesson well.

8GB iPhone 3G for $199. Perfect price-point storm?

What do you think?

Monday we asked you “What’s the iPhone 3G Chip and When Will it Ship?“. Tuesday it was “What is the iPhone 3G Going to Look Like?“. Wednesday brought “What Surprises Will There Be in the iPhone 2.0 Software & Services?”. Thursday questioned “What 3rd Party iPhone SDK Apps Will Be Available Launch Day?” Today we want to know what else the iPhone 3G will feature, both now and into the future?

GPS is the biggie (right after 3G!). What about a front-facing camera? VGA screen? Stereo Bluetooth? Wireless N? Full-sized querty keyboard? … (Ha!) What do YOU think?

To give you some help, here’s a HUGE roundup of all the iPhone SDK 3rd party apps rumors. Epic-style. Because let’s face it, roughly 0.01 seconds after Steve Jobs pulled the first iPhone from his pocket back at Macworld 2007, and someone, somewhere, put aside their childlike sense of wonder long enough think: “Nice! What’s the next gen going to be like?”

Complementary, contradictory, obvious, confusing, all but confirmed or from left field via outer space, the rumors have flooded the internet ever since. It’s become almost impossible to keep track of them all.

Three days from today Steve Jobs takes Moscone Center stage for the sold-out WWDC keynote, and according to everyone and their newsfeed, announces the iPhone 3G. In eager anticipation, every day this week, TiPb wil be asking you to tell us what you think the next generation iPhone will be, from 3G to GPS, release dates to price points, colors to casings, 2.0 software to .Mac .Me services, and this weekend we’ll wrap it all up with a look into the WWDC/iPhone 3G Crystal Ball, and a roundup of the very best of YOUR predictions.

So come on, let’s get in on!

Read the rest of this entry »

Monday we asked you “What’s the iPhone 3G Chip and When Will it Ship?“. Tuesday it was “What is the iPhone 3G Going to Look Like?“. Wednesday brought “What Surprises Will There Be in the iPhone 2.0 Software & Services?” Today we want to know what 3rd party iPhone SDK Apps might be ready to download come launch day?

EA, Salesforce, AOL, Sega, and a noble few were right there at the beginning, and since then dozens if not hundreds of others have been rumored if not confirmed, including titans like Microsoft, Sun, and Adobe. But who will be ready come game (and business!) day? Bioshock? Documents2Go? SlingBox? Flash?! What do YOU think?

To give you some help, here’s a HUGE roundup of all the iPhone SDK 3rd party apps rumors. Epic-style. Because let’s face it, roughly 0.01 seconds after Steve Jobs pulled the first iPhone from his pocket back at Macworld 2007, and someone, somewhere, put aside their childlike sense of wonder long enough think: “Nice! What’s the next gen going to be like?”

Complementary, contradictory, obvious, confusing, all but confirmed or from left field via outer space, the rumors have flooded the internet ever since. It’s become almost impossible to keep track of them all.

Four days from today Steve Jobs takes Moscone Center stage for the sold-out WWDC keynote, and according to everyone and their newsfeed, announces the iPhone 3G. In eager anticipation, every day this week, TiPb wil be asking you to tell us what you think the next generation iPhone will be, from 3G to GPS, release dates to price points, colors to casings, 2.0 software to .Mac .Me services, and this weekend we’ll wrap it all up with a look into the WWDC/iPhone 3G Crystal Ball, and a roundup of the very best of YOUR predictions.

So come on, let’s get in on!

Read the rest of this entry »

What? Oh, sorry… You though we…? Nope. Dunno. Haven’t the foggiest. Maybe you could tell us? When Steve Jobs pulls out the updated version of his little pocket universe dent’er, what’s he going to call it?

• iPhone 3G
• iPhone Black
• iPhone: The Next Generation
• iPhone Nano
• iPhone Pro
• i2
• iPhone BOLDEST
• iPhone X 2.0 “Lynx”
• iPhone M6524X2519 (oops, Nokia’s already TM’d that…)
• iPhone Me
• iPhone Take 2
• iPhone Release II: Attack of the iClones
• iPhone Air
• iPhone Vista

No? None of the above? Well then, what do you think the next generation iPhone will be called?

And remember, this is a Wait-A-Thon post! Comment on this post — or comment on any post tagged “Wait-a-Thon” — for your chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card! Note that you must post with a valid and real email address so we can send you your prize — no switching!

Monday we asked you “What’s the iPhone 3G Chip and When Will it Ship?“. Tuesday it was “What is the iPhone 3G Going to Look Like?“. Today we want to know what YOU think the iPhone 2.0 software and services are going to give us, and what surprises might they have in store?

Exchange ActiveSync and the AppStore are gimmes. Enterprise features are checked. Beta leaks are everywhere. And .Mac to Mobile Me — Don’t get us started! But what else will we get? MMS? Blogging? Mobile iChat? Universal home remote control? And what about the Holy Grail… cut and paste?! What do YOU think?

To give you some help, here’s a HUGE roundup of all the iPhone 2.0 software and services rumors. Epic-style. Because let’s face it, roughly 0.01 seconds after Steve Jobs pulled the first iPhone from his pocket back at Macworld 2007, and someone, somewhere, put aside their childlike sense of wonder long enough think: “Nice! What’s the next gen going to be like?”

Complementary, contradictory, obvious, confusing, all but confirmed or from left field via outer space, the rumors have flooded the internet ever since. It’s become almost impossible to keep track of them all.

Five days from today Steve Jobs takes Moscone Center stage for the sold-out WWDC keynote, and according to everyone and their newsfeed, announces the iPhone 3G. In eager anticipation, every day this week, TiPb wil be asking you to tell us what you think the next generation iPhone will be, from 3G to GPS, release dates to price points, colors to casings, 2.0 software to .Mac .Me services, and this weekend we’ll wrap it all up with a look into the WWDC/iPhone 3G Crystal Ball, and a roundup of the very best of YOUR predictions.

So come on, let’s get in on!

Read the rest of this entry »