Some of the major features I’ve been waiting for with an iPhone are finally here and am glad I am able to upgrade for the $199 price today.  Most importantly the HD video recording, LED flash, 5-megapixel camera and double RAM are all exciting features I think the iPhone has been needing over the last year to keep up with the Android phones that are being released.

Now, I just got to get my 3GS sold this morning so I can go down and get it!

Tiered pricing structures are seriously a bad thing.  It basically says that the companies like AT&T who are raking in profits from the explosion in iPhone sales over the past few years can’t keep up with the demand, so in order so solve this problem they take a step back in innovation and force us to use our smart phones less.  Yes, less.  Wouldn’t you think a communications company would want their customers to use their phones more?  The fact that AT&T thinks 90% of their smart phone customers use less than 2GB of data per month is ridiculous.  I would love to see these numbers for iPhone users only. What’s worse is Apple is coming out with new phones that depend on extra bandwidth and network needs and AT&T is cutting back.  What a slap in the face to your customers.

I also read about how Skype is now going to charge to use their service over 3G starting in 2011 (it was 2010 until users complained).  Why do you think they are charging?  They have never charged ever for Skype-to-Skype.  If you ask me I think it’s because of AT&T.  This is their new business model; cut the bandwidth of all your users, and make them pay to use specific services.  Here you go folks, a la carte internet.  Want to use Hulu?  Got to pay another $5/m which goes to AT&T.  Netflix?  Another $5/mo.  I think you see where I am going.

Also recently Comcast won in a net neutrality case that gives them the ability to manage or throttle network traffic depending on the service.  This talk has been around for a while but now a court has actually ruled in their favor.  Shame. This gives Comcast the right to even exclude services such as Youtube or Hulu from their network, or charge you higher premium fees to use those ‘bandwidth hog’ services.

Sadly, the way communication companies are controlling the internet for their own gain and limiting technology and innovation for personal profit is leading to a dark future.  It’s something that makes someone who is a programmer and depends on the web and open communication and protocols really uneasy.

Well today I read one of my favorite e-card companies, Someecard had their iPhone application rejected because of “defaming” famous people.  From the Someecards blog:

Imagine the horror we felt to learn our iPhone app wasn’t rejected for some sort of horribly off-color dildo joke. That is, unless the App Store just randomly chose three not-that-objectionable cards as examples of unacceptable content (see below). Are we really being told we can’t “defame” famous people? Even Hitler? Let us know what you think of the notification below.

Wow Apple.  What a way to promote free speech.  Things like this are what make me now want to write iPhone applications more and more each day.

Check out the official press release from AT&T:

We know many of our iPhone customers are eager for an update on our rollout schedule for Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). We’ve been working for the past several months to prepare our systems and network to ensure the best possible experience with MMS when it launches – and that launch date is: September 25 for iPhone 3G and 3GS customers. MMS will be enabled through a software update on that day.

We know that iPhone users will embrace MMS. The unique capabilities and high usage of the iPhone’s multimedia capabilities required us to work on our network MMS architecture to carry the expected record volumes of MMS traffic and ensure an excellent experience from Day One. We appreciate your patience as we work toward that end.

We’re riding the leading edge of smartphone growth that’s resulted in an explosion of traffic over the AT&T network. Wireless use on our network has grown an average of 350 percent year-over-year for the past two years, and is projected to continue at a rapid pace in 2009 and beyond. The volume of smartphone data traffic the AT&T network is handling is unmatched in the wireless industry. We want you to know that we’re working relentlessly to innovate and invest in our network to anticipate this growth in usage and to stay ahead of the anticipated growth in data demand, new devices and applications for years to come.

Finally glad it’s coming, especially this month.  This must mean iPhone OS 3.1 is shipping as well with this update.  I love how ATT tries to justify their lag on deploying this though on their MMS architecture, good one.

Source: AT&T

I’m all for new products coming and making our lives easier.  One of these I discovered in the past six months was FriendFeed.  If you’re unaware, FriendFeed is a great social aggregation tool that brings together everything you’re doing around the web, assuming that service has an API and FriendFeed has integrated it.

At the time I write this FriendFeed has 58 services you can configure for your accounts ranging from Flickr to Yelp to Youtube even with your rated movies on Netflix.  The beauty of all this is that when you do something on one of these services you can have that action posted to Twitter automatically (sweet).  But I have two major complaints that I just can’t take FriendFeed serious enough to make it my primary client.

Service Prefix/Suffix Definitions for Twitter

Since a lot of people use FriendFeed to pipe their social behavoir around the web to Twitter, you know people are going to want customization.  Well, currently there is not much.  Here are some examples of FriendFeed twitter integration posts:

• Me and My Wife http://ff.im/123456 (Flickr)
• McDonalds http://ff.im/123456 (Yelp)
• Milkshakes http://ff.im/123456 (Blog)

I think you see my point.  The main issue with this is that no matter what service I am using, the Twitter integration is not very descriptive at all so a lot of your followers just start taking your tweets as spam because they have absolutely no context.  My proposition is that for each configured service, FriendFeed allow you to at least prefix the tweet with either the service or a custom text.  Re-iterating my examples from above they may look like this with the new changes:

• Flickr: Me and My Wife http://ff.im/123456
• Review: McDonalds http://ff.im/123456
• New Blog Entry: Milkshakes http://ff.im/123456

At least I feel this addition is needed to make Twitter integration complete.  Then, my followers won’t know what they’re clicking and can only click things that they feel are relevant for what they want.

iPhone Application

Does this really need more explanation?  If I can’t load up my FriendFeed stream and post to it from a slick iPhone application it’s just not feasible.  I know they have a web based app but it just doesn’t cut it for me.  Now if I had these two features I would be a 100% dedicated FriendFeed customer.

But for some reason I feel like I’m paying for it.

For example, my monthly costs for my lines are now more expensive.  AT&T still hasn’t pushed MMS or tethering and still will not give a expected date of when it will be arriving.  But the worst problem I have, agreeing with Arrington is the lockdown and control AT&T and Apple are having on the applications with the iPhone.  As a software programmer it’s really disheartening to see how much control they want to have over their devices.  We should be pushing more towards open and shared platforms.  Not locked down, controlled environments where AT&T is dictating who gets approved to the App Store or not based on internal reasons that make no sense for consumers, only them.   If I didn’t just resign a two-year deal I probably would think about bailing ship.

I really wanted to start writing iPhone applications as soon as I got my iMac, but maybe I will just look into writing applications for the Palm Pre and their webOS platform.

And another thing.  Why is it so difficult for Apple to implement more common features with their software and hardware, at least relating to iTunes?  The Microsoft Zune has Wi-Fi syncing and a lot of other cool features and it seems Apple is never going to put these into their hardware.  What about iTunes streaming?  Oh, gotta buy an Apple TV for that.

For $1.99 you can’t beat the price and you won’t have to deal with emails or text messages.

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By the way this was all shot with my iPhone 3GS.  Hope everyone had a wonderful fourth.

Here is a video from the day I got my new iPhone with DJ Clint playing at Lush in Fresno, which takes place at the Starline in Tower District.

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Expect more to come, not just of House music but any of the music related events we attend in the Fresno area and abroad.