July 11th, Really?

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the 3G iPhone for some time, and was mostly pleased with the new features, but the July 11th release date was a bit of a drag, as I’m no good with the whole delayed-gratification thing. Besides the higher data speeds and third party apps, the feature I’m most excited about is Exchange integration, given our shop at Foundry Group uses Exchange for our calendar, contacts and messaging. Oh, geotagging of photos is pretty damn cool as well.

But since I cannot truly be satisfied by what’s currently available and am always looking around the corner, I might as well complain a bit. The iPhone needs a better camera — with Samsung and others shipping 5 megapixel camera phones, the fact that Apple didn’t bump up the pixel count beyond two paltry megapixels on the 3G iPhone was disappointing. As is the ongoing lack of ability to record video, though I’m hopeful this can be addressed in a future software upgrade and won’t require another hardware rev. The late-breaking rumors of a front-facing camera for video conferencing were also intriguing, so that was another unfulfilled item on my wishlist. And, finally, I’d be more than happy to pay a premium for more storage, and I was really hoping for a 32GB capacity model. Looks like I’ll have to wait until 2009 to get those wishes fulfilled.

Despite my bitching, I’ll be in line on July 11th to get the new iPhone – it will still be (by far) the coolest phone out there.