One of my mates got a new mac & the other day I was having a play around with it. It is sweet.  The UI is out & out gorgeous, no question. It’s intuitive too, I really haven’t used a mac since I was in high school, but it all just worked.  The photo application using the built-in web cam was a lot of fun & the Time Capsule app is really nice (plus its interface, like everything else, is just plain fun).

The new iPhone looks to be much of the same, beautiful design, easy to use software and, soon to be available, lots of third party apps to install.  The ability to sync with Exchange looks to be a really good feature, this puts it in direct competition with the Blackberry.   The new iPhone will finally get 3G networking support too.  A lot of people wondered why this wasn’t in the original iPhone, but none the less it will have it now.  It’ doesn’t have video recording or video calling facilities, and while some may wonder why, I don’t see this as a problem.  Video calling was the original major selling point of the 3G network, but it really hasn’t taken off.  I’ve got a 3G phone & I’ve only ever made a single video call - when I first got it to test it out - but it’s just not feasible to use normally.

This brings me to my point.  The new iPhone will run on the 3G network, but it won’t have MMS or video facilities.  Have a look at the features page, it ain’t there.  It will take photos, and you can email them or sync them with the new MobileMe service, but you can’t directly send them to other mobile phones with MMS.  It’s certainly not a big deal, but this is such a simple feature I’m really not sure why it would be left out.  It seems like Apple doesn’t want it’s users to know that there are other 3G phones out there, it’s the walled garden all over again.

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