I was in the audience when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone last year (and thought the initial price points of $499 and $599 were crazy-high).
I also declared I wouldn’t buy an iPhone until it was capable of hooking into a high-speed Internet network. Early adopters, unforunately, are stuck with AT&T’s pokey Edge network, while those who were patient have been rewarded. (My understanding is that the 1.7 million current iPhones cannot be retrofitted for 3G.)
On Monday (1 pm ET / 10 am PT), Steve Jobs is expected to take to the stage at Apple’s big developer conference and announce a 3G network iPhone, and some rumors put the price tag at $299. Engadget has the pointers.
I’ll grab one now, for sure. Hmm, my birthday’s coming up next month …
Monday: Ryan Block at Engadget is live-blogging Jobs’ keynote.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
I’ll also be buying a 3G iPhone once they are released. I’ve been waiting for this announcement for a long time.
With all eyes in the mobile world on Apple this week I thought I thought the time was right to talk about what we believe is the best way to conduct a mobile web search on a device like the iPhone…a device with a rich, full screen, touchscreen only. Namely: Voice search. You say it, our speech recognition (running on a server) produces text, the text automatically dumps into the search engine that’s the subscriber’s choice (Google, AOL, MSN, etc.), the search engine returns results. Or via voice, search for any content from your local iTunes playlists.
Using the Apple developer kit, we’ve been hard at work developing impressive technology that make the iPhones capabilities even more powerful. Voice search. Song search and selection. At the touch of a button and simply by saying the word. Over the next few days – as the excitement mounts for the WWDC – we’ll be sharing more and more details here on our blog. For now though, I think all of us should sit back, relax and enjoy the show.
Of course, we believe the most powerful use of speech would be running on the iPhone itself (vs a remote server) and made available to the developer community via iPhone’s SDK APIs.
I pooh-poohed the iPhone because of some of it’s shortcomings, mainly 3G. Especially already having a powerful 3G WM PDA. My friends with crappy phones saw it as a big upgrade anyway.
But when the 3G iPhone goes on sale, I’m getting one this time. I’ll be a hold out no longer. Support is growing fast for the iPhone and it makes it worth having.