iPhone 3G: Unanswered Questions

2008 June 10

I’m sure every­one and their moth­ers have already blogged this, but here are the lin­ger­ing ques­tions I have fol­low­ing today’s WWDC keynote:

  • A new remote “erase” fea­ture was alluded to dur­ing the enter­prise por­tion of the pre­sen­ta­tion. How will this work, and who con­trols it? If I’m late pay­ing my AT&T bill, try to break my con­tract, or try to unlock the phone for use with another car­rier, will the phone self-destruct?

  • Apple announced a new push noti­fi­ca­tion ser­vice for devel­oper use, but I’m guess­ing it ain’t free. How much will it cost, and who can use it? Will small, inde­pen­dent devel­op­ers be priced out of the pic­ture? And is it part of the new Mobile Me ser­vice, or can it oper­ate on its own, serv­ing users who don’t have $99/year Mobile Me accounts?

  • How much will my monthly 3G phone bill cost? (More, presumably.)

  • Is 3G ser­vice even avail­able in my area? How can I find out before pur­chas­ing a new phone?

  • Will Mobile Me’s push email ser­vice work only with me.com email accounts? (I’m guess­ing yes, which means I wouldn’t be able to use it with alignedleft.com.)

  • How does the new Mail app’s UI for multiple-message delete/move work? This is new func­tion­al­ity for iPhone, but it won’t be use­ful unless it’s also usable.

  • Same ques­tion for the mul­ti­ple lan­guage sup­port: How does the UI work for switch­ing languages/keyboards? And can the hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion used for Chinese char­ac­ter input be expanded for use with other alphabets?

Also, Jobs men­tioned that the audio qual­ity had been improved sig­nif­i­cantly. It will be inter­est­ing to hear if that’s really the case.

Update: I also want to add one obser­va­tion that I haven’t seen made else­where yet:

  • It looks like iPhone 2.0 sup­ports mul­ti­ple iCal cal­en­dars, which was not men­tioned in the keynote (nor on Apple’s site). This will be great, as it brings my iPhone cal­en­dar more in line, visu­ally, with my desk­top iCal cal­en­dar. (I hope this also elim­i­nates the bug/feature of hav­ing new events entered on the phone sync unpre­dictably into the last cal­en­dar in iCal’s list.)

One comment. »

  1. 3G is more like “2.5G“–Still after five years of promise with lit­tle deliv­ery. The band­width for 3G will be avail­able when ter­res­trial tele­vi­sion sta­tions stop broad­cast­ing in February of 2009. Who gets the band­width depends on who wins the FCC auc­tions and how much money they’re will­ing to fork over.

    It’s good that Apple is think­ing ahead. Even if it’s not avail­able now, it’s a nod to the near future. That, and they’re not build­ing in obso­les­cence on the newer model’s phone chip set for a while. They might, how­ever make a model that has more drive space.

    Comment by Colin — 2008 June 12 @ 11:48 pm

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