Predictions are over and the chatter is on. The long awaited iPhone 3G has been announced and will hit stores on July 11th. The addition of 3G and GPS technology in the iPhone now makes it the most competitive device on the market, especially at its $199 price tag! The usability factor has jumped by a huge margin after seeing all the games and productivity tools demoed during the keynote.

The App Store: Probably the greatest thing that has ever happened to mobile computing. Never has anyone been able to download apps of all sorts on the fly from a unified location. I think it's cool having the ability to download apps over the air straight to the iPhone if they're 10MB or less. Developers also get a big a treat from what Apple is providing them - a platform to easily develop software and then distribute with complete control of the pricing. Who knew that iTunes was going to turn into the single most important Apple product?

What we have seen so far: Medical apps, games, productivity tools, music creation, eBay, and even GPS enabled social networking! What more can you ask for from something that's been in the works for such a short time? Speaking of GPS, I am very excited about using it in conjunction with Google Maps. I plan on traveling a lot and snapping pictures that get geotagged automatically will come in handy.

The TypePad application was pretty impressive even from the limited features we got to see. It has the ability to post entries with images that you can take on the fly, or choose from your library. It would be nice to see tools developed for other blogging engines like WordPress, which is the one I favor.

Mobile Me: Apple stated a long time ago that they would be revamping their online services. They weren't kidding! Integration of email, calendar, address book and photo galleries on all of my machines is more seamless than ever before. Whenever I add a new contact, modify a calendar event or receive email, everything will stay in sync across the board.

Apple's Guided Tour is definitely worth the watch to get a good idea of what Mobile Me is about. My .Mac account will be getting an upgrade as soon as Mobile Me is launched. The web applications that have been built feel completely natural and a pleasure to use. I will definitely be renewing my subscription in a couple of months.

Forbes.com recently wrote about the potential of the iPhone as a handheld gaming system. This sparked some thoughts in my mind about what Apple could be planning come June 9th. The release of the SDK and the announcement of the App Store makes the iPhone a tremendous platform for content distribution.

With the amount of market share Apple holds in the mobile world, the iPhone is more than suitable as a portable game console. We have already seen a glimpse of what the iPhone can do when EA demoed Super Monkey Ball and Spore on March 6th. The iPhone may have twice the power of Sony's PSP, but will its button-less makeup prove to be useful or inept?

iPhone vs PSP and Nintendo DS - Would Apple stand a chance?
Yes, the iPhone is powerful enough to handle top notch handheld graphics, but will it really work as a gaming platform? After all, it is a phone, and we all know what happened when Nokia attempted to join the big boys with the N-Gage. Continue reading for a list issues the iPhone faces.

We're days away from this year's Worldwide Developer's Conference and the hype is getting hotter by the minute! Lifehacker has reported that location-aware applications will be changing our lives, while rumors have it that "Snow Leopard" (OS X 10.6) will be announced. We have already seen a million iPhone 3G mockups and "leaked" shots. Now we have to see what Apple's really got hidden up their sleeves.

Geo-location Photo Tagging:
Having this feature on the iPhone would be pretty handy in my case. I use the iPhone camera all the time, and it would be cool to have location tagged photos. Some people aren't too crazy about this feature since the 2MP camera doesn't take pics that are worth tagging. Also: If cell tower triangulation is used for every picture taken, how will that effect battery life?

This, of course, is just one of the many highly anticipated features expected to be a part of the iPhone 2.0 update and iPhone 3G. We've seen some pretty awesome developments at the iPhone Software Roadmap conference back in March. I am anticipating a lot of things to be fixed and updated, as well as a plethora of applications including games, productivity tools, and more.

I've owned quite a few mobile devices, and none have been able to do what the iPhone has done for me. The iPhone has helped me with school, work, blogging, social events, and personal development. Here's how:

With School: Last semester I took a psychology course that was partially online based. Several days throughout the week, we were required to communicate on the message boards and take exams. Having the busy schedule that I did, I wasnt always in front of a computer. I've taken exams at the gym, posted replies while driving in a car, and communicated with the professor from the movie theatre. Some things just can't be done so well on other devices.

With work: When I used to work retail, there were times where I had to swap schedules, let HR know about my delays, and receive special notes from the team members regarding updates. In terms of my design clients, I can't exactly use Photoshop on the road, but helping me stay in touch with them has been a tremendous benefit. More after the jump...

Ever since my brother purchased a Sony HDV video camera (HVR-Z1U), I've had the desire to somehow get into filming things. I have a few ideas about what I can capture, and hopefully I can get something done during the summer as long as my other web projects don't get in the way. From my recent purchase of the Adobe Master Collection, I now have full access to Premiere and Affter Effects. I have never used these applications but I am very eager to learn.

The things that I have in mind are mostly shorts, but I'd like to work on something a bit longer at some point. Right now, I'm contemplating on how I should distribute the works when completed. There's always YouTube and others like Viddler, Revver, and Vimeo. Maybe I can have my future videos distributed throughout all of them. I don't have any skills in this art whatsoever, so any and all advice on how to get started is welcome.

This year's Worldwide Developers Conference hits from June 9th to the 13th. In the first week of March, Apple held the "iPhone Software Roadmap" event that made a huge buzz in the tech world with their future plans. The SDK was released to developers for just under a hundred bucks, and things have been kicking along pretty well since then.

Apple demoed a few applications ranging from games to native applications, as well as some great upgrades to their own applications including exchange server support with Mail. Without getting too much into what was discussed, the idea here is that the possibilities that have been unlocked on the iPhone are phenomenal.

I put together a small list of things that I've missed on my iPhone. They're not exactly the most complicated apps out there, but most of them being the most obvious ones for general use. Check out my list after the jump...

Most people don't realize how important feedback is to develop worthy software. Whether the feedback is to report a bug, or to ask for software features and enhancements, they all serve a valuable purpose. I am promoting the idea of giving feedback because I have good experiences with it. Because of my 2 minutes that I took to ask for a certain feature or bug fix, they have been addressed accordingly, and I (amongst many others) are happy.

The main reason why I am writing this post is because iPhone Safari has been getting on my nerves all too much. Ever since the release day of the iPhone, Safari was never able to maintain browsing multiple websites at once without all the pages resetting and having to reload. This is very aggravating especially when I'm chatting. I can't ever click a link and browse around for a couple of minutes without my BeeJive website blanking out and having to reload. More after the jump...

It's been a while since I last came across a new application that blew me away like Acrylic's Times. Created by young developer, Dustin MacDonald, this is a new and surprisingly pleasurable way of keeping up with the latest news from your favorite websites! I've been playing with the trial version for a little while now and I can only give positive remarks. The amount of detail that went into this application is very impressive. Basing its ground on Mac OS X technologies like Core Animation, navigating through the fluid interface is simple and delightful.

Get the trial & Enter to win!
You can head over to the Times homepage and get yourself a trial copy of the application. You can also win 1 of 5 copies of this program - Desktop Vibes is holding a giveaway so don't forget to enter! If you truly care about a new and efficient way of checking your RSS feeds, I think you'll find this quite handy.

After all the advancements in today's technology, we're coming up with more things we can use once, and just trash it in the end. This time, a company by the name of Hop-on has created a phone with no LCD that apparently got lots of attention at CTIA. A European distributor bought 10,000 of these GSM based phones for a test run on how these would work out.

I know it's all good for business with the east profits and all, but I think this is just another way to use up more plastic and destroy our environment with plastics! Why can't we just stick with the awesome cheap phones that we can use many times over?

It's understandable that someone may not need a cellphone permanently, but may want a quick way to get in touch with someone. If someone is willing to pay $20 to use a phone for a short time and throw it out, why not just get a damn prepaid phone and keep the credit on that? If someone can give me a good reason to support this development, please do so!

The recent buzz around the blogosphere has been about ISPs capping bandwidth and charging by the Gigabyte. To some, this is a complete disaster while others couldn't care less. The idea of capping bandwidth is not new as companies around the world have been practicing this method of service delivery (like Australia).

With the recent advancements in transfer speeds alongside things like online HD movie rentals and video communication, these people decide to introduce the cap now, when they're supposed to be doing quite the opposite! Imagine how quickly an average internet user will suck through 30 to 40GB of bandwidth in one month - HD movie rentals, international video conferencing, browsing high bandwidth web content (Youtube!), and so forth.

I just don't understand why ISP companies want to be greedy and make more money this way now. They know that people will go above their capped limits and the easy money will flow right into their pockets. Eventually, I believe that internet access will reach a point where it'll be so cheap, companies will be forced to just have one monthly rate. More after the jump...