By Alvin Soon

WHEN you stop and think about it, it's either insanely great, brilliant marketing or a complete geek-fest when you have so much anticipation for a mobile phone that websites start posting rumours, speculation, supposed leaks and long wish lists months before its guessed-at release date.

Fans devotedly post mock-up after mock-up, imagining just what this new phone will look like. Live-bloggers flock to the event, and blog every single detail as it occurs.

And when the phone is finally unveiled to thundering applause, blogs explode, the local news reports it and HWM has one of its best-selling issues yet. Whether it's cool or crazy, no other mobile phone release commands so much attention.

Whether you love it or hate it (and invariably it seems you either do or don't), the iPhone isn't just here and here to stay - it's just got upgraded on its first birthday.

IPHONE 3G

THE new version of the iPhone is slightly bigger, with an increase of height by 0.5mm, width by 1.1mm and depth by 0.7mm.

It's slimmer at the sides because of its curves and for all the additional features, surprisingly lighter by 2g. Other than that, and its new plastic black and white backs, it looks very much like the original.

Mr Steve Jobs highlighted that one of the goals for the new iPhone was to make it more affordable. The iPhone's price has certainly had an eventful journey. When it first launched last year, Apple was selling the 8GB model for US$599 (S$814). Three months later in September, Apple dropped it to US$399.

Just five months later, in February this year, Apple released a 16GB model at US$499. Today, the new iPhone 3G 8GB model - with more hardware features than the original - is set at US$199 while the 16GB model is going for US$299, three hundred dollars less than the first 8GB iPhone.

Although the new hardware upgrades for the iPhone are appealing, if long anticipated and to nobody's surprise, the newly unveiled MobileMe is the surprise punch in Apple's announcement. And it brings an interesting dimension to how iPhone's future could play out.

KEEPING IN SYNC

TOGETHER with the iPhone 3G, a new web-based service called MobileMe was also introduced.

Tagged "Exchange for the rest of us", it promises to do what Exchange servers do for the iPhone, but for ordinary, non-Enterprise users.

Whereas Exchange support is free with the iPhone 2.0 firmware update, MobileMe comes with a US$99 annual price-tag. Even though it comes with a price, we think this is going to be a big one.

The problem with having multiple devices is keeping them in sync. I could have a Windows Mobile smartphone, an iPod, a Windows PC and a Mac running at home, but when I'm on one device I might want to work on something I left on another.

If you use several devices that handle your work and life-critical information, we're sure you've faced this problem before.

The amazing thing about MobileMe is that now you won't need to physically plug in your devices to sync them.

Through the Internet you'll be able to sync what you do on one to another, and you can push information - whether e-mail, files or photos - back and forth. This gives another meaning to the phrase "computing in the cloud", but (and this is a major but) now you're doing it with your mobile phone.

Syncing is not a new invention, but to see Apple as a latecomer to the game is missing the boat.

Apple has a knack for making complicated tech easy. You only have to look at the other big app that Apple has pushed in the past year: Time Machine.

Time Machine isn't doing anything new, but what it is doing is making an essential task simple and invisible.

If it works and works well, MobileMe will sync your devices simply and invisibly, so that you have what you want when you want it. Of course, these devices and software will mostly belong to Apple.

It's a brilliant move by Apple to lure you into their hardware and software eco-system, especially when the ordinary user sees how easy it is compared to Apple's competitors.

We're guessing that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg for MobileMe's functionality, and like any application, the sky's the limit for future expansion.

A NEW COMPUTER

SOME of us weren't there to see the rise of the home computer. We didn't wobble floppy disks, struggle with MS-DOS on a green, monochrome monitor or marvel at desktop icons.

We didn't realise how much things changed when an application like Word meant you didn't have to buy correcting tape for your typewriter in order to correct mistakes, or retype entire documents to re-arrange paragraphs.

We didn't see how an application like the VisiCalc spreadsheet - the first ever "killer app" - moved computers from a niche hobby into the offices.

For the generation that grew up around computers, they might think that this is it. This is the shape and form of a computer.

Sure, it might change form and structure. It might grow smaller or more powerful, but a desktop or laptop shape and form is what they're used to seeing.

It might be harder for them to think different, to see the birth of a brand new computing platform, but essentially that's what the iPhone is.

Hardware comes and goes. You'd hardly find anyone happily using a PC with 10-year-old specs now. But 10 years on, we're still using Windows and Mac OS X, because they've evolved and upgraded through time.

A year from now, we might see yet another new iPhone, but the Mac OS X iPhone platform stays. Beyond selling you a phone, Apple is selling you a platform, and like Windows and Mac OS, once you're entrenched in one computing platform you usually stay entrenched.

Beyond the shape of any ultra-mobile PC, the iPhone is now the newest computing platform in town, even though it's harder to see it as such, because it comes in the vaguely familiar shape of an iPod and phone.

Think of the complexity of such a challenge - an entire ecology of hardware (Macs, iPods, iPhones), services (iTunes, MobileMe) and software (Mac OS X and iPhone apps) that work together seamlessly, an operating environment that so far major mobile competitors have yet to achieve.

Think of the flexibility of this mobile phone platform, with complete OS upgrades that can be pushed to your phone and apps you can buy to increase functionality.

Windows Mobile and Symbian have yet to see the killer app that would explode their popularity. Will the iPhone be the one to beat them to the punch?

Also think of the far-reaching implications of this challenge, that if Apple succeeds, we will be the ones who were here to witness the birth of a new computing platform to complement Windows and Mac OS, the birth of a new mobile computing device, and the birth of a new kind of phone that nobody has yet seen.

With Apple's computer platform and music, movies and TV platform in iTunes, an expandable storage disk in the cloud and sync functionality, who knows what else could be possible?

With iPhone 3G and MobileMe in the playing field, these are going to be interesting times indeed.

The writer is a designer and technology enthusiast who finds the combination between good design and technology in the monthly tech magazine HWM. This article also appeared in the July issue of HWM.

myp@sph.com.sg

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