So, by now every­one knows everything there is to know about the iPhone 2, so I don’t have much to add. I thought I’d men­tion how dis­ap­poin­ted I am with it though.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, 3G is a big deal, and GPS is nice, but really… is that it?

The thing is, I don’t even know what I was hop­ing for; it just wasn’t this: the device that should have launched a year ago. I mean, they didn’t even up the stor­age to sweeten the deal.

Obvi­ously, I’ll be get­ting one, due to the device’s only really com­pel­ling new fea­ture: its price. O2’s some­what aggress­ive pri­cing means that I can upgrade to one with double the stor­age and a bet­ter data con­nec­tion for a scant £60, which, I sup­pose, is noth­ing to be com­plain­ing about.

In fact, maybe it’s churl­ish to be com­plain­ing at all; the iPhone was already a very desir­able device — I cer­tainly have yet to regret get­ting mine, even with only 8GB stor­age and 2G data — and increas­ing the spec at all while lower­ing the price isn’t some­thing you’d usu­ally com­plain about.

I just can’t help feel­ing that if the most excit­ing new fea­ture is a price reduc­tion, that the hype might be a little mis­placed this time round.

In a sur­prise (to me) move, o2 have announced a major shift in their tar­iffs, includ­ing a sig­ni­fic­ant change to their iPhone charges. This is great news for cus­tom­ers, as the inclus­ive minute and text allow­ances have gen­er­ally been sig­ni­fic­antly increased.

Being on the £45/​mo tar­iff, I gain the least; I only get double the inclus­ive minutes (up to 20 hours a month) now, the £35/​mo plan has three times the inclus­ive minutes (up to 10 hours) and two and a half times the texts. The £55/​mo tar­iff is gone, replaced by a totally over-​​the-​​top £75/​mo one that I, hon­estly, can’t see any­one going for. All tar­iffs con­tinue to offer unlim­ited free data over GPRS, EDGE and WiFi (via The Cloud.)

It’s not likely to sell the iPhone to any­one who wasn’t con­vinced, but it’s done a lot to improve the cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion of at least one consumer.

Apple have finally announced plans to allow third party developers to develop for their iPhone plat­form, bring­ing the device one step closer to the smart­phone it always wanted to be.

If the qual­ity of share­ware and free­ware avail­able for the Mac plat­form is any­thing to go by, this should lead to a pleth­ora of high-​​quality, reasonably-​​priced add-​​ons for the phone, which should really increase it’s appeal to the more tech-​​savy consumer.

Per­son­ally, this com­bined with actu­ally hav­ing seen one the other week is prob­ably enough to sell me one. Now all I need to do is find the money, and con­vince o2 to let me out of my exist­ing con­tract early…

Hey, it could happen!

Apple announced an entire new line of iPods at yesterday’s key­note. Asside from redesign­ing the Shuffle and the Nano, and doub­ling the capa­city of the stand­ard iPod (now called the “iPod Clas­sic”,) the really excit­ing news was the announce­ment of the much anti­cip­ated iPod Touch, which is effect­ively an iPhone with more stor­age and without the, well, phone.

Now I have to say it’s a very sexy device indeed; it’s got a big screen, a new UI and it looks gor­geous, but there’s no way on earth I’d buy one. Why? It’s got a max­imum stor­age of 16GB, that’s why. It’s a move I just can’t under­stand. Why on Earth, would they give what is clearly their new flag­ship iPod 10% of the stor­age of the old-​​style one? Why would they give a device that is clearly inten­ded for video play­back less room than I need to store all my music, never mind some­thing more to put some movies in? It’s a real shame, too. I have no inten­tion of buy­ing an iPhone — not unless it’s a lot cheaper in the UK than the US — and the pro­spect of an iPod that could play movies well, and be used as a handy wifi web browser is quite appeal­ing, but only if it also meets all my require­ments for a music player, and para­mount amongst those require­ments is that is simply must have enough stor­age for my music.

At the same time, the iPod clas­sic has just too muchspace. Not that that’s any bad thing, and it’s the iPod I’d be look­ing at get­ting if mine were to break, but given that my cur­rent model, with 100GB less space, has enough room for my music and then some, there’s just no point upgrad­ing there either.