The Reveal

The long awaited announcement from Apple about its next generation iPhone happened today. Prior to this morning’s conference at the Cupertino offices, pundits and fanboys alike had been whipping the mobile population into a froth with the feature speculations, design assumptions and capabilities wish lists. It was almost impossible not to hear or read about ‘the latest iPhone rumor’.

In short, the run up to the day of reveal was exhausting.

Unfortunately it is rare when the dream matches up to reality. So it seems there is a lot of grumbling and unhappy mobile customers riffing about the shortfalls of the launch.

I don’t understand why – there are some fantastic features that I have to say I’m pretty satisfied with.

What am I excited about?

WORLD PHONE!

I have been holding on to my dear old BlackBerry Tour 9630 because it is a world phone. How great it is to have both a GSM and a CDMA radio inside. Since I’m a Verizon customer I can roam seamlessly on Vodafone when I’m outside the U.S. The new iPhone is also a world phone and this multi network roaming capability removes the last of my ties to BlackBerry.

Sweet.

SIRI

I have been working with ML technologies similar to those that power SIRI and am really happy to see AI making it into mainstream products. I think SIRI has a lot of promise and I’m looking forward to seeing it mature.

New Camera

8-megapixel camera that supports HD (1080p) video recording, up to 30 frames per second with audio.

I find that there are so many spontaneous situations in which I want to use my phone’s camera; having 8-megapixels will provide me just that much more richness of detail. Who needs a digtial camera anymore?

1080p HD video. What else is there to say?

iMessage

I use BlackBerry Messenger everyday. It’s a fantastic tool for communicating and sharing. Well, now I have the equivalent functionality and more with iMessage. I can see who’s reading the messages I have sent, do group chat, send pictures and videos. Everything I loved about BBM is now present with iMessage.

The comments about ‘what happened to iPhone 5’ will surely continue to bounce and tweet over the coming days. Guess that means there will be less of a preorder queue for me. :)