I’m a bit disappointed with today’s Apple keynote – not with the actual products themselves, but the lousy shipping dates. Apple taking the stores down usually indicates that they’re about to release something for immediate purchase but all we got was the AppleTVwith a release date of next month and the iPhone (check out the interface demos – totally awesome!) which we won’t see in Europe until the end of the year!

I understand why Apple have announced the iPhone now but I was really hoping that this baby would be my next phone – now I’m going to have to upgrade my phone twice this year as my k750i is old and on it’s way out.

As for my predictions, I pretty much got it completely wrong. Out of my six main predictions I kind of got three of them correct.

I correctly predicted a new phone and a new PDA, just not that they would be one and the same. I was wrong about the name – Apple did actually call it the iPhone and I got the form factor a bit wrong, but I did get a lot of the functionality correct! iTunes integration, Safari, Touchscreen and OSX on a mobile device. In all honesty, my prediction for this device had pretty much everything you could put in – I was bound to get a couple right!

My other (partially) correct prediction was of course, the new AppleTV which supports high-def (so it’s just a matter of time before we get high-def on the iTunes store!) and 802.11n!! The $299 price tag has been translated to Ã?£199 (should be more like Ã?£154) in the UK store – once again we get screwed by the currency conversion!

Personally, I think that there was more to come, but due to the hardware screw up that happened during the keynote, they had to skip a few announcements (this would also explain why the apple store crapped out for about ten minutes – I think there were more products due to be put on and they screwed up while they were rushing to remove the new products!) I expect we’ll see another keynote around the shipping date of the AppleTV with more info about the new versions of iLife and OSX and maybe that one more thing that we’ve come to know and love…

Now then… when can we expect that next keynote?

Update – One more thing after all! – New Airport extreme base station!

Hmm… browsing the Apple website it seems that a) Mr Jobs has forgotten to mention the new 802.11n compatible Airport Extreme base station (also shipping February) and b) That I was right – Apple are using 802.11n as the new standard across the range… we all know that most of the latest hardware has secret ‘n’ compatible wi-fi inside just waiting to be unlocked, and this is probably why!

Personally, when I upgrade to 802.11n I’ll buy the latest netgear device as I really can’t be bothered with a separate wifi router AND adsl router – I’d rather just have it all in one device.

Categorised as: Geeky | Opinions