At first, I was really cheesed about what Amazon did concerning removing books from the Kindle. But their apology is a demonstration that they have taken responsibility for their actions and learned a little something along the way.

A few months ago, the GV Mobile application for the iPhone was released and I happily purchased the application since I’ve been a GrandCentral, now Google Voice user for quite some time.

But recently, Apple (perhaps with AT&T pressure) pulled this application from the iTunes store. And they rejected the official Google Voice app from Google.

Thankfully, Apple didn’t “kill” the apps on the device if you already had the application running, but no more updates.

What I don’t understand is why an application can be totally fine for several months, including a few patches, and then suddenly it is rejected. Is there a problem with the application review process? Or was Apple too busy dealing with “naughty pictures” applications at the time.

Now the FCC is investigating. Apple will claim control over its closed system, Google will claim “openess,” and AT&T will say it wasn’t them. Perhaps we will all learn something.

I do feel like I have a little “badge” from this war each time I run GV Mobile. Thanks for your hard work Sean Kovacs.

Apple News Update
The keynote address will start with Steve Jobs giving the “State of the Mac” update. He will highlight the number of countries where the iPhone 3G is now available, iPhone market share, laptop sales numbers, App Store success for developers and overall revenue. In other words, “Buy Apple stock, we actually have cash in the bank and great products.”

Preview of Snow Leopard
Steve will turn over the presentation to Phil Schiller to demonstrate some features of the upcoming operating system. There will be a focus on enterprise features to better integrate with corporate networks. For some reason, my sources tell me that there will be someone from Cisco touting enterprise security and the Mac in some form. In an effort to be “green,” Apple will be offering Snow Leopard as a downloadable upgrade version to existing Leopard customers for a reduced cost. Steve will come back in to tell us that Snow Leopard will be shipping in April or May of 2009. (Coincidentally, that is when new iMacs and iLife will arrive too.)

MacPro Update
Steve will come back and introduce Scott Forstall to present the updated MacPro. This will feature the Intel Nehalem processor, support for USB 3.0, an optional Blu-ray burner, and new graphics card options. Also expected would be a refresh of the 30″ LED Cinema Display, same idea as the new 24″ version. (Side note, the 20″ display will vanish.)

AppleTV/MacMini = MediaMac
Steve will return ready to announce the next generation AppleTV update, or perhaps called the MediaMac. More HD content will available through iTunes with more studio partnerships. The FrontRow interface will be upgraded to support a partnership with NetFlix and perhaps viewing web content through Safari. iPhone/iPod Touch Remote application will get an upgrade to make this even cooler. In spite of the “Bag of Hurt” comment, there will be a Blu-ray reader on one of the models. (Side note, people will gripe that you can’t burn DVDs or CDs from the MediaMac, which is so five years ago anyway.) You will be able to connect external hard drives and stream content from iTunes libraries on the local network. And the device will support 1080p video formats. Price for this will be $299 with a DVD drive or $499 with a Blu-ray drive. And the MediaMac will have the same style as the current AppleTV/MacMini, but instead of white, the case will be aluminum with black plastic inset.

Not Mentioned in the Keynote
Shortly after the keynote, Apple will release the 17″ MacBook Pro with the updated form factor, which will ship in February. Also there will be upgrades to the Xserve line with the new Intel processors.

Not Going to Happen
There will not be a Mac tablet or mini notebook machine. Steve Jobs will not have gained 20 pounds. John Mayer will not be playing at this event.

So if by some amazing chance my predictions for MacWorld are correct, I wanted to at least make sure my post was out there early! Post your comments below with your predictions.

• Phone Different Store (SmartPhone Experts) – A good selection of cases and accessories for your iPhone.
• BodyGuardz – clear film for the entire iPhone to protect from scratches if you prefer to hold the “naked” phone.
• SmartPhone Experts SidePouch – I’ve been using this style of case from SmartPhone Experts for years, first with the Treo and now with the iPhone. Silent magnetic closure (great for pulling out the phone during meetings or classes without velcro or snapping sounds) and very durable. My Treo case lasted almost two years and my iPhone has lasted over a year and still practically perfect. And its only $25.
• Apple Remote (free) – control iTunes on your WiFi network.
• Google Mobile App (free) – access all things Google, and it searches content your phone.
• Jott (free) – create voice notes that are converted to text and manage lists.
• LinkedIn (free)
• Facebook (free)
• AOL Instant Messenger (free)
• OmniFocus (Mac & iPhone Application) – probably the best GTD to-do application, with a desktop application to go along with it. Not cheap, but I use it all of the time.
• Evernote – universal junk drawer, works on Mac, PC, iPhone application and from the web.
• 1Password – Password Manager + Automatic Form Filler (Mac & iPhone application)
• Air Sharing – turns your iPhone into a wireless drive (WebDAV server) so you can drop files into it from machines on your WiFi network. You can then browse and view all compatible file types (Word, Excel, PDF, iWork, RTF, Text, Movies, etc.).
• AP Mobile News Network (free) – news stories from the AP News Wire.
• NYTimes (free) – news stories from the NY Times.
• WeatherBug (free) – weather for your iPhone with doppler radar.
• Wikipanion (free) – Wikipedia on the iPhone.
• WhitePages Mobile (free) – people & business search, reverse phone look up.
• Sol Free Solitaire (free) – you need to have solitaire, plain and simple, and this version works very well.
• Morocco (free) – Othello game that works very nicely, and the price is right.
• Trism ($2.99) – Similar to Bejeweled but with triangles which fall in the direction that the phone is leaning.
• Spore Origins – seriously fun and challenging game which is perfect on the iPhone, and especially fun if you happen to be a biologist. (I’ve been stuck on level 29 for a while, any tips to get through this, please post in the comments.)
• Bubbles (free) – start this app, hand the phone to your 3-year old and go to the bathroom in peace.
• Lightsaber Unleashed (free) – a blatant ad for the Star Wars iPhone game, but this gives you the motion based lightsaber and now includes theme music. Similar to the above, start this app, hand the phone to your husband and go to the bathroom in peace.

If you have any other suggestions for iPhone newbies, post them in the comments.

But that got me thinking. If Apple designers added the thickness all the way around, what improvements could have been made?

• Battery life – 20% more time using the phone on 3G or GPS would be good. Perhaps Apple wouldn’t advise you to turn off all of its new features in order to get the most out of the battery.
• Camera – an upgraded camera would certainly be appreciated, a little higher resolution and a little better optics would make a huge difference to many people. It still wouldn’t be an SLR, so people will complain anyway.
• Antennas – there are at least four antennas inside the iPhone, so a little extra space would have allowed for slightly larger antennas to improve reception for 3G, WiFi, EDGE, Bluetooth, etc. And better reception helps everything.

What else can you think of that would be a welcome addition?

Someone like WebEx or Citrix (GoToWebinar) would be the natural choice to develop this. As an attendee, you could call in on the phone and then view a shared screen, allowing you to zoom in for details. And add the chat window to complete the experience. I could see this requiring 3G or Wi-Fi access for speed reasons.

I would see this as a free application, since the goal is for attendees to participate from a mobile platform.

Does this make sense to you? Post your thoughts in the comments.

So this post is being written from a new iPhone application now available. While it doesn’t give full administration, it does let me add new posts.

It also lets me add photos to the post, in this case a screenshot from the application.

Also nice is the ability to schedule posts, add tags, set categories and preview the post. One major problem is the lack of cut and paste on the iPhone, but that is certainly not the fault of this app.

It will be interesting to see how this application improves over time as well as whether I find myself posting more often.

After exploring the new features of the device, here are a few of the highlights:

• I have multiple email accounts setup on the phone. In your settings, you choose a default mail account to use as the “send” account when you click on links from websites. To forward a picture from my phone to a friend, I had to have a personal account set as default. To forward a link to a client, I had to have a work account as the default. With the new firmware, I can select from the message itself which account the message is coming from. For people that have both work and home addresses on the phone, this also allows you to reply using your personal account when your friend sends something to your work address.
• One of the very cool applications for the iPhone is Apple’s remote control application. From this new application you start by pairing your iPhone with iTunes, Airport Express and AppleTV on your local WiFi network. From there, you can use the phone as a remote control. The content doesn’t play through your phone, but rather its original source.
• There is now a “Contacts” application, rather than having to go through the phone application to the contacts area. And in this, you have contacts search. So when you start typing a person’s name or company name, the phone immediately shows the results. This is great if you know the company that you want to call, but cannot remember the person’s name. I’d love to see this extend to a partial phone number search as well.
• As good as web based games can be on the iPhone, native iPhone games are amazing, and there will be lots of them. The one game that all iPhone owners should get is Trism, a puzzle game similar to Bejeweled and Tetris. The twist is that you tilt the phone to slide the triangles into place. It is very addictive and this game can only be played on an iPhone.

I’m very excited about OmniFocus for the iPhone, but I want to spend some more time with it before giving it a more in depth review.

This got me thinking: Did he just post 18 ideas for startup companies? Yes, I think that he did.

So, what ideas do you have for mixing contextual data? And how can this be delivered on mobile devices, like the iPhone or the Android platform?

Post your thoughts in the comments.

Over the past month, everyone who knows me has been asking me about the next iPhone. Usually, it includes the obvious question, “Are you getting the new one?”

For me, the answer is simple. “No.”

Here are my reasons:

1. Many people are excited about the 3G speeds for the network, but the coverage is still pretty scarce. Yes, it is in my area, but I don’t have to drive too far to be outside of it.
2. Many people are excited about the GPS chip in the new iPhone, but it is not a replacement for a turn-by-turn directions device, like a Garmin or a TomTom.
3. Running the 3G and GPS will kill your battery life, and Apple recommends turning these off when you don’t specifically need them. Chances are that in the moment that you want to quick check a website, the 7 seconds that you will shave off from having 3G speeds will be replaced with 20 seconds to turn on 3G and then jump back to find the link and then… oh, never mind. I’m willing to trade a few seconds here and there when browsing the web on my phone for all day battery life. Not to mention that WiFi is very pervasive and faster than a 3G network.
4. The new pricing plans are significantly higher than the existing plans and text messages are not included. If did the same exact plan that I have now, I would pay an extra $360 over the 2-year contract plus an $18 upgrade fee plus the cost of the phone itself. Yes, the plans are still reasonable compared to Blackberries, but I like my current deal.
5. With the original iPhone, Apple revolutionized the activation process by doing it through iTunes. My experience was flawless and it took less than 8 minutes while I was surfing the web in another window. With the new iPhone, activation must happen in the store. If you want to try to avoid the 30 minutes of annoyance that it takes to purchase and activate a cell phone, AT&T has provided a “Get iReady Checklist” PDF file.
6. The compelling feature of the new iPhone is the 2.0 software update, specifically ability to have third-party applications. And the original iPhone will run these perfectly. There may be some applications that will benefit from the precision of a GPS chip compared to cell tower triangulation, but I will be able to live without that. I’m most excited about the productivity apps and games (not-so productive apps) that will run locally on the phone.

All that said, the new iPhone will be great and I highly recommend it. But if you have the current original iPhone, wait for the 3.0 iPhone that will probably ship sometime in July of 2009.

• 16 GB and 32 GB versions of the phone at $399 and $499 respectively and yes, there will be a 3G chipset as the entire world is predicting.
  Apple stuck with the 8 GB and 16 GB versions of the phone, now with 3G, but with a severe price cut of $199 and $299 respectively.
• No internal GPS chip, but the 2.0 software will support external GPS devices through Bluetooth or through the dock connector. GPS kills the battery life and I don’t think that Apple would be willing to trade battery life for handheld GPS when they have a good solution with triangulation and WiFi locations.
  Internal “Assisted” GPS is onboard with the new phone.
• The iPhone will be a little bit thinner and perhaps a little lighter from an upgraded glass used for the touch screen. There are mixed rumors about the iPhone getting thinner and some saying that it will get thicker. Remember, Apple would rather make it thinner and lighter. Can you really picture Steve Jobs going onto the stage and saying, “The new iPhone is 2 millimeters thicker than before and I think that our customers are really going to appreciate the added girth.” Seriously.
  Steve downplayed the size other than to mention that it is thinner at the edges. The case is now plastic and the upgraded glass allowed it to be mostly the same weight.
• No ‘haptic’ touch response. Totally useless feature to have the phone vibrate a little when you touch it. Seriously, the touch response is built in to your actual fingers. If they include this, there better be a way to turn it off.
  Correct on this.
• There will be a way to search your contacts database on the phone that is similar to Spotlight search where you just start typing part of a name, company, address, phone number and it narrows down the contacts as you type. I need contacts search all of the time as I remember part of someone’s name or a company name.
  Mostly correct. Hard to determine if you can search business name or address from the demos.
• The 2.0 firmware will have a task application that works with the Leopard task service. I think that the reason this wasn’t included already has more to do with getting tasks to play nicely with Outlook on Windows machines.
  No task application, although the App Store will certainly get a full collection.
• Along the same lines the Notes application will get more useful and will synchronize with the Leopard notes that are in Apple Mail. My way out theory on this is that it will support in-line voice notes. If Apple doesn’t do it, I’m sure that a third-party developer will go for something like this.
  This may just arrive, but nothing for certain with today’s announcement.
• The 2.0 firmware will include a built-in game, something like Solitaire. There will be a LOT of games released with the 2.0 firmware and the AppStore for the iPhone. iPod Touch users will be thrilled as well for the new games that will turn the iPod Touch into a viable player in the handheld gaming space.
  No built in game, but the App Store will have at least 3 very cool games at launch as demonstrated yesterday. iPod Touch users will have to pay $10 to upgrade to the new firmware.
• The really interesting news is going to be from third-party developers and what they release for the iPhone. Apple can focus on the core feature set knowing that there are thousands of developers just waiting to create cool applications for a very hungry market of consumers. Personally, I want Yojimbo to sync with the iPhone.
  We saw demonstrations from a collection of companies including a music application from a single developer and very cool medical applications.
• For email, each account can have its own default signature, perhaps even sync this with Apple Mail. I have no reason to expect this, but it is a little wishful thinking.
  Still wishful thinking. We did get some better email management and saving image attachments.
• This may sound really basic, but there will be a way to copy and paste text from one application to another. This is more a challenge with the touch interface than anything else as there isn’t a logical gesture for this that doesn’t require a little bit of training.
  Not yet as far as I can tell. Perhaps in iPhone 2.1 or 3.0.

All in all, yesterday’s announcement is a bit of a yawn for me. Really, the big difference with the new iPhone is the plastic case, the 3G speed, GPS and a price cut. Functionally, my current iPhone will be able to do almost all of the same things (not the GPS or as fast) as the new model. Launching it in 70 countries is pretty special as well, but since I’m here in the USA, that wasn’t an issue for me.

The interesting announcement was revamping .Mac into MobileMe, and as a subscriber to .Mac, I’m curious to get my hands on the new features when this rolls out next month.

What makes this interesting is that SEPTA’s website is pretty inconvenient for finding train schedules, but this iPhone optimized website is quite brilliant. You simply enter the start and end points and it shows you what trains and the schedules of the next five running. Even though it is a small audience, more public transportation services should see this example.

The application is executed perfectly. It answers the user need: “I’m in Berwyn and I need to get to 30th Street Station…(tap…scroll…tap)…Ah! The R5 and it leaves at 10:34am. Thank you, iSepta.org!”

Now onto my experience. After receiving my private invitation to the service, signing up with BrightKite was simple.

Finding Friends

With any social network application, the overall experience gets better as more friends participate. BrightKite is no exception. Fortunately, they have developed a tool to discover existing friends from your Twitter network. During the private beta, you have a limited number of email invitations available for sharing. (Let me know in the comments if you are interested in trying it out as I have a few extra invitations available.)

Searching for Locations

Searching for locations was quite easy as you can put in an address or a business name in your search. Once you find a location, you can add it to your “Placemarks” for easy recall. In my testing, I found that searching was very good and I was always able to locate the business or address without any problems.

Posting Photos

Posting photos is seriously simple. If you are online, you can upload a photo a create a caption through the web interface. Since BrightKite is about being mobile, posting a photo is just a matter of emailing the photo from your phone to a special email address at BrightKite. The subject of your email becomes the photo caption and the photo is posted to the place where you are currently located. That said, it would be nice if they included a quick instruction about the subject line becoming the caption for the attached photo.

Mobile Interface

BrightKite has a very nice iPhone interface. For this reason, I didn’t use the SMS capabilities for updating my location with BrightKite. I found the iPhone interface very responsive and very nicely designed. It wasn’t an afterthought, rather it was clearly designed to include the bulk of the functionality that you would want when you are on the go.

Scientific Findings

The downside of the service is that it is new. It will obviously get better as more users join the party. You can totally tell that some people are posting the equivalent of “Hello World” while others are posting constantly. Over time, the novelty will wear off and posts will be more interesting.

One thing that BrightKite made perfectly clear: I have a boring social life. Basically, I go to work and I go home. Yes, there were a couple of times where I actually went out and I posted my location to BrightKite and posted a photo or two. But for the most part, I wasn’t the party animal that BrightKite is targeting.

If you own a restaurant or a night club or other venue, you should be on BrightKite. Take pictures and post with captions to BrightKite even if you never move. When a user gets near your location, BrightKite lets users know that you (or your venue) are close by and your “Placestream” becomes a marketing message for you.

Suggestion Box

It would be nice if you could selectively post to Twitter. Right now it is all or nothing. Perhaps a checkbox for the online posting form or a tag (#notweet) in the email message to prevent a Twitter posting.

When looking for people nearby, you should be able to expand your radius out more since the service still needs more users. The current limits with the current user base basically let me know that I’m the only one around.

Privacy options should be more flexible, perhaps allowing you to specify placemarks (specifically home) where you want to be private compared to a restaurant where you want people to find you. Seriously, I don’t want to share my home address and related posts with everyone, but if I’m at a chic restaurant, I want everyone possible to find me there.

Trust by user is a nice feature, but with a lot of users, could become difficult to manage a long list of friends. Perhaps BrightKite could allow you to group your followers so that when someone starts following you, you can put them into one of several groups.

Final Thoughts

BrightKite shows serious promise as a web application. It does what it sets out to do quite well. Clearly the target is a younger demographic that has an actual night life. Clearly, if you are not a fan of Twitter, BrightKite will not turn you into a microblogger overnight.

But will I keep using it? After two weeks of use, I think that I might post to it occasionally if I have a great photo or funny quote. I like the fact that it is focused on locations, text quotes and pictures. Its strength is this focus. I can see restaurants using it to promote themselves by encouraging users to post great stuff at the restaurant.

Most mobile phones have some access to Internet content but the experience is less than stellar. Apple provided a rich framework to write web-based applications optimized for the iPhone. Since the iPhone has been launched, many of the major websites have created special versions just for the iPhone. Some of these include: (If you have an iPhone, tap on the links and then bookmark on your phone.)

Amazon, AP News, Bank of America, BrightKite, CBS News, DIGG, ESPN PodCenter, Facebook, Food Network, Fox News, Google (Search, News, Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Reader), Gyminee, Hahlo, LinkedIn, Los Angeles Times, Jott, NewsGator, Realtor.com, Ta-Da List, Twitter, Weather.com, Weather Underground, and many more!

So what is the point here? The influence of the iPhone has created another version of the Internet, optimized just for this small number of users. I also believe that having your site optimized for this particular audience actually serves as a promotional tool.

If you know of more sites, please post them in the comments.

I was anxious all morning and afternoon without my trusted iPhone. I ran through all of the scenarios: maybe I would be without a phone for a week while mine was repaired; maybe I would have to pay to fix it or worse, replace it; maybe they wouldn’t have any in stock for replacement. (There is a new version of the iPhone coming out in the next month or so. The iPhone is out of stock everywhere in the US.)

So I got to the Apple Store a little early for my appointment, checked in and waited for about 5 minutes until they were ready for me. I explained what happened and took a look at my phone and confirmed that it was cooked. They opened a drawer, pulled out a replacement iPhone and swapped out the SIM card. We plugged the new phone into my laptop machine and the restore happened gracefully. My phone reauthorized with AT&T, my contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, podcasts and such synchronized and I was ready to go. I signed some simple paperwork to acknowledge the swap and I was on my way.

The whole process took less than 10 minutes. No loaner, no fees, no questions. Just a shiny new phone. I was ecstatic.

I purchased a new screen protector for the phone and during the checkout, the Apple rep saw that I had a .Mac account. So, he asked if I had any suggestions for the .Mac service. We talked for about 5 minutes about my years with .Mac and that I’ve been mostly happy but I felt that the service needed to step up to the plate. Mostly, I use it to sync between multiple machines. My suggestion was that .Mac members have their iTunes Store purchases automatically backed up to your iDisk without taking up any space. In other words, no need to manually backup purchases as I could always download the tracks again from an authorized computer.

In short, I had a one-to-one conversation with an Apple employee interested in my suggestions. And right after they had amazed me with their customer service.

I have a post tomorrow about making big promises and then over delivering. Today, Apple over delivered on its big promise.

I was already a loyal Apple customer, but today proved why.

• What are cell phones doing to our society?

One of the points that the writer, Jonathan Last, makes in the article is something that my wife and I discuss all of the time. Cell phones let us connect individually, but disconnect socially. He talks about this as “radical disengagement” where using the cell phone in public excludes us from the activity around us while imposing our personal activities on them as well.

While it may seem strange, I actually reserve my bluetooth headset to my car. Otherwise, I use the wired headphones. I try to avoid the disengagement but I’m certainly not perfect with this. It is a hard balance because the default behavior is making the “radical disengagement” not quite so radical.

2. Color Laser Printer: toner didn’t magically materialize. We are committed to “go green” by going paperless. That printer was too big anyway.

3. iPhone: unresponsive. Appointment with Apple Store Genius for this afternoon. Hopefully it is covered under the warranty.

Today was one of those days. With guests staying with us, I shut down my desktop machine, an old dual-processor G4 from 2002. It is quite noisy. When I went to power it up this morning, it didn’t. Nothing, nada, zip. Uh-oh. Usual tricks didn’t work either. Double uh-oh. So I walked away to try to enjoy the rest of the day as we were throwing a spring version of my daughter’s birthday party.

From my laptop, I needed to print a couple of pages for the party. I got out just enough before the printer informed me that it too was done. “Yellow Toner Empty,” it informed me. And it is one of those lasers that once one of the cartridges is empty, it won’t print anything. Ah well, I’m trying to go paperless anyway.

After dinner, I put my iPhone onto the charger since I was done for the day. About an hour later, I went to grab it off the charger and it was BURNING HOT! Seriously. I couldn’t physically handle it. The charger was pretty darn hot too so I unplugged that as well. AAAAAHH!!!

I managed to do something to get my G4 breathing again, and it is thankfully humming (wheezing) away. My guests will simply have to deal with it. New toner for my laser printer (it needs yellow and magenta) is about $120 per cartridge. The iPhone has yet to regain consciousness.

Time for a glass of wine. Okay, two glasses.

The customer would purchase a new phone either from Apple or AT&T as usual. AT&T will offer a $200 activation credit on the iPhone with a new 2-year contract. AT&T will only subsidize the cost of the phone if they can get the activation. This would be a way to counter the number of phones that were purchased and never activated with AT&T (probably somewhere unlocked in Asia).

And while I haven’t heard about this part at all, I can imagine that this $200 activation credit would be for users who activate with one of the newer flat rate unlimited plans. AT&T is not going to give Apple an extra $200 per handset without an activation at the end of the tunnel.

For me, this is a very logical and simple solution that gets AT&T more subscribers and basically changes nothing for Apple’s profits.

• 16 GB and 32 GB versions of the phone at $399 and $499 respectively and yes, there will be a 3G chipset as the entire world is predicting.
• No internal GPS chip, but the 2.0 software will support external GPS devices through Bluetooth or through the dock connector. GPS kills the battery life and I don’t think that Apple would be willing to trade battery life for handheld GPS when they have a good solution with triangulation and WiFi locations.
• The iPhone will be a little bit thinner and perhaps a little lighter from an upgraded glass used for the touch screen. There are mixed rumors about the iPhone getting thinner and some saying that it will get thicker. Remember, Apple would rather make it thinner and lighter. Can you really picture Steve Jobs going onto the stage and saying, “The new iPhone is 2 millimeters thicker than before and I think that our customers are really going to appreciate the added girth.” Seriously.
• No ‘haptic’ touch response. Totally useless feature to have the phone vibrate a little when you touch it. Seriously, the touch response is built in to your actual fingers. If they include this, there better be a way to turn it off.
• There will be a way to search your contacts database on the phone that is similar to Spotlight search where you just start typing part of a name, company, address, phone number and it narrows down the contacts as you type. I need contacts search all of the time as I remember part of someone’s name or a company name.
• The 2.0 firmware will have a task application that works with the Leopard task service. I think that the reason this wasn’t included already has more to do with getting tasks to play nicely with Outlook on Windows machines.
• Along the same lines the Notes application will get more useful and will synchronize with the Leopard notes that are in Apple Mail. My way out theory on this is that it will support in-line voice notes. If Apple doesn’t do it, I’m sure that a third-party developer will go for something like this.
• The 2.0 firmware will include a built-in game, something like Solitaire. There will be a LOT of games released with the 2.0 firmware and the AppStore for the iPhone. iPod Touch users will be thrilled as well for the new games that will turn the iPod Touch into a viable player in the handheld gaming space.
• The really interesting news is going to be from third-party developers and what they release for the iPhone. Apple can focus on the core feature set knowing that there are thousands of developers just waiting to create cool applications for a very hungry market of consumers. Personally, I want Yojimbo to sync with the iPhone.
• For email, each account can have its own default signature, perhaps even sync this with Apple Mail. I have no reason to expect this, but it is a little wishful thinking.
• This may sound really basic, but there will be a way to copy and paste text from one application to another. This is more a challenge with the touch interface than anything else as there isn’t a logical gesture for this that doesn’t require a little bit of training.

If you have any other good predictions, please post these in the comments.

While I might be speculating, the iPhone SDK will turn the iPod Touch into an amazing PDA and gaming device. The WiFi enabled iPod Touch and the potential that the SDK offers surely will deliver all of the features that users of a traditional PDA would demand.

Post your thoughts in the comments.

And for a few more thoughts on this, The Unoffical Apple Weblog has this comment.

And then Seth Godin has this to say about how to spend $20 million.

“These improvements will, instead, translate into an increased ability to maintain connection with the cellular network, with more stations available to your phone, and less interference from signal reflections. This means fewer dropped calls, greater coverage areas, and faster Web browsing and file transfers.”

Personally, the antenna sticking up from the center of the case (what probably actually makes it work) is visually bad. Griffin has a great history of innovative products so perhaps the next version will find a way to shrink down the antenna and perhaps include a belt-clip of sorts.