More on the 3G iPhone

As I thought about it overnight the sales channel that Apple established had some other good features when compared to the rollout of the first phone. In the first version, there was limited product in the channel. Very little mention was made of AT&T. WIth this rollout there seem to be fewer shortages although at the end of the weekend there seemed to be some shortages on the Apple store site. The 16gig model seems to be a lot more popular and from a quick review black seems to outsell white. The computer tie up was a flub but one which they seem to have recovered from.

There were 10 million downloads from the Application store and as I browsed the list last night I found several big applications and many smaller ones which I thought could be very useful. On Saturday, when we were at Disneyland, my son-in-law and I thought of another application. Disneyland has a way to manage crowds on its most popular rides called FastPass. You check in to this and then return at a slightly later time to go to the head of the line. A great ap would allow a person at the entrance, using WIFI, to plan out their day and then calendar it into your phone, with a kiosk to print out the passes or even better with a bluetooth device at each location to "stamp" the pass.

Last night I went into MobileMe to take a better look. One of the major reasons I was interested in this upgrade was MobileMe. The Web based applications of Contacts, Mail, Photos and Calendar are integrated with website storage to work like an exchange server. All of that seems to work - thus, when you implement push technology on your phone - all of those sets of activities are coordinated on all of your devices - Phone, Laptop and Desktop. As importantly, if you have access to the net and no devices you can still use the applications. The tool bar is simple and easy to use.

In addition to all of the other things MobileMe can do it will allow you to create a personal domain (your own website). I will migrate a lot of my personal webpages over to that area quickly. It will allow me to edit the page(s) on the fly with iWeb.

One of the annoyances I have had with the Calendar function has been the inability of my administrative assistant to get into my calendar and change it. Now she can.

MobileMe relies on an understanding of the "cloud" (remote storage) and its possibilities and then assures that all of the ways you access the cloud are coordinated. That has the possibility of being a remarkable gift to users like me who understand how HTML works but don't want to do it.