"It's not good for the customer."

Says Apple. Interesting approach to customer service for sure, once upon a time there was a quaint little concept, "The customer is always right." Of course that is a very QUAINT little concept in today's world. This tends to be how Apple has always behaved, "we'll tell you what you like and you'll like it until we tell you to like something different." Today Apple took the wraps off of what they'd like us to like now and are calling it iPhone 3.0.

The keynote started off highlighting new features for "developers" and then went into a seemingly endless amount of app demos. I find it rather unfortunate how heavily these demos tend to skew towards big names like EA, ESPN, etc. but I suppose that is to be expected and there was some indie representation today so. As far as what was demoed given how hard they were pushing push, which had an ETA of about 6 months ago, you would have thought it was the second coming. The concept seemed pretty clear to me by about the 8th demo. They also had a game developer demo what Apple is calling something like "in app commerce" or something essentially another thing they can collect their 30% on. The example they showed was a first-person shooter where you could pay an additional $0.99 to upgrade your arsenal.

These were the two things that stuck out in my mind from the first part of the keynote and I have to say I remain very skeptical about both. I'm not a MobileMe user and I have never subscribed to it or its predecessor .Mac but from all the stories, etc. I've heard about both services which represent Apple's previous forays into the world of networking and cloud services I'm more than a little worried about all this push stuff. I hope to be proven wrong but part of me expects them to turn it on the first day and for there to be...um...issues. Also I think it is a little disingenuous of Apple to blame background apps for issues with battery and memory use. After all Apple owns the OS they could place limits on those things at a low level and compensate for some of that. The real point is that there's quite a bit of spin coming out of Apple on the issue of background apps. As Apple themselves declared "it's not good for the customer." The other troubling though more and more pervasive trend is the idea that you have to pay for in game features and upgrades ah the world of monetization. This is of course as I thought about it more is already happening on XBOX and Steam. Gone are the days when "IDKFA" would get you full weapons in Doom...FOR FREE.

Next up were the customer focused features. You can read several write-ups on them but I like TUAW's the best. I would say that the biggest features were by far were Copy/Paste and MMS. I'd have to say that personally I was looking forward to MMS most. My friends without iPhones have a habit of sending me an MMS and I simply CANNOT view them on an iPhone, you get an SMS with a cryptic link, username, and password to a page that, at least when last I checked, only works in Internet Explorer. So I then sit there completely ashamed of my $500 phone that can't do something someone else's free phone is able to do. Now it is even worse because the iPhone 3G will have this feature and I still won't. Why must you force me to loathe myself Apple? Apparently there is something in the iPhone Edge's cell radio that prevents MMS I can't imagine what this could be, given that 1000's of other phones are able to accomplish the feat of MMS, perhaps is it just that AT&T is ashamed of how bad the MMS experience would be their sub-par EDGE data network? Not that I am in anyway bitter. As far as Cut/Paste I honestly haven't missed it as much as others have but I am glad that it will be there. Perhaps the most exciting feature I can actually use on my iPhone is the search functionality I am looking forward to be able to search and launch apps as opposed to having to swipe over 8 screens, that should be a big improvement also the ability to search all my music will be nice as well so thank you for that Apple.

Of course none of these features do anything to address numerous other shortcomings of the iPhone but there will always be room for improvement we can continue to hope for example for things like video recording, flash, and a BETTER CAMERA. Perhaps the biggest outstanding issue though is the bizarre and incoherent process that is iPhone App Store approval. Apple needs to do something to address or at least communicate this process. The idea that something like Tweetiegate can happen is quite troubling. Not to mention the less than open market place the App Store represents and forces a gray, perhaps even black, market for jailbroken iPhone Apps. All the other issues not withstanding I think the App Store issues represent the most pressing before Apple and I hope that address them in a sane and responsive manner.

All of that said while I am disappointed in some ways I can see Apple is TRYING to address the critics and giving people Copy/Paste, MMS, Landscape Mode, Notes Syncing, all of which directly target very common iPhone gripes. I look forward to seeing what they do next with hardware. I can't justify buying a 3G even with iPhone 3.0 it is still to similar to the iPhone I already have. I would LOVE...LOVE to see a new piece of hardware with a higher quality camera, maybe video capability.

It's hard being a technology enthusiast sometimes, I've been on the development side of things, but I'm also a consumer and as a consumer I always want more and I think part of the reason Apple users have such high standards and always want more than what they're given is because there is so much potential and we can see it gleaming there in the distance and we want to be able to reach out and grab it but Apple is a company that has to make a profit and has limited resources with which to do so, so of course it has to prioritize and can't just give it's users everything they want all the time. Despite the fairly harsh critical tone of this message I remain and Apple fan with hopefully eye toward future developments.