It’s The App Store… Stupid!

The initial round of reviews of the iPhone 3G are coming in and one thing is clear- as we have been saying all along THE HARDWARE ISN’T THE NEWS HERE THE APP STORE IS!

James Kendrick of JKOnTheRun put it quite well in a post earlier today

In the end, I believe that the App Store and the 2.0 firmware are the much bigger story here.

While I will be upgrading to the new phone, I tend to agree with much of Chris’ arguement as to why he is not doing so. (I do NOT, however, agree with the second part of his post which is coming later today!)

3G speeds are nice but not neccessary. The biggest initial selling point on the iPhone for me was the seemless way in which it hands off to WiFi from Edge whenever a usable WiFi connection becomes available. Since both my home and work have WiFi 90% of my time is spent using this speedt connection. When Edge is an absolute neccessity the availability of iPhone optimized sites more than compensates for the slow pace of the connection. Do I end up having to wait some times? Sure.  Most of the time, though, I move along just fine.

GPS is nice but not neccessary. The location feature on the first generation iPhone doesn’t have GPS but works pretty darn well. In fact, I have usually chosen to use it over my stand-alone gps unit in recent months since it not only works well but is also with me all the time. The addition of GPS may speed up getting a location lock and/or be more accurate but while nice, it is not neccessary.

And the  list goes on- the reception is likely better because of the plastic back, the speaker is louder and clearer etc etc. All of these are nice but not things that are HUGE news.

No, the big news are the apps.

And they are just 24 hours away.