When Apple released the iPhone 3G, I immediately upgraded. It was a no-brainer for me. I wanted the speed of the 3G network. The only thing that I missed was the design. I’ve always preferred the original design to the iPhone 3G and 3GS.

When the iPhone 3GS came out, most of the features that came with it were ho-hum to me. The only thing I really wanted was the video camera. If AT&T had granted me an earlier upgrade date than they did, I might would have upgraded. But as it was, I was going to have to wait about six months to upgrade, or the first of this year.

By the time I was upgrade eligible, I was just fine waiting for the next generation of the iPhone. It was a relatively short wait, and my patience has paid off.

Apple’s release of the iPhone 4 has me far more excited than the iPhone 3GS. From design to improvements, the iPhone 4 looks like a brilliant phone that will once again revolutionizes what a smart phone should be.

Here’s what grabbed me from the Steve Jobs keynote:

1. Design. This phone is beautiful. Like the original, it has a flat back. It is thin. The lines are beautiful. Solid black backing, stainless steel frame and black-framed glass. As I said, I’ve never liked the design of the 3G-series. When the photos of the iPhone 4 prototype were leaked, I got excited. It is a work of beauty.

2. HD Video. Too many times I’ve seen my kids doing something or I’ve been on the job and I’ve wished for video capability on my iPhone. Now, I get it. Plus, the iPhone 4 records in HD. Combined with what looks like a real promising endeavor with iMovie for iPhone, this is going to be fantastic to use.

3. Camera Improvements. Increasing the camera to 5 megapixels was nice, but it’s only a fraction of what Apple really did here. They’ve done two things that will make it the best camera on any phone. First was a flash, which other smart phones have. The second, however, is really unique. The inclusion of a backside illumination sensor helps boost the quality of the photos. Full details on the camera are here.

4. Retina Display. This makes a big difference if you do a lot of reading on your iPhone. I suspect it will make a real difference with the increased abilities of the camera and with iMovie for iPhone as well. As much as I use Instapaper and Kindle on my iPhone, I welcome what Apple has done here. It will be the sharpest display of any phone available. Read more about Retina Display here.

5. iOS 4 changes. Not only did the name change from iPhone OS to iOS, the new features were shown in more detail yesterday. Multitasking and folders are the two things that excite me the most. I’m also looking forward to the ability of adding multiple Exchange accounts. All of this will make my iPhone much more useable as an enterprise machine.

6. iBooks. We knew it was coming, and now it is official. iBooks is coming to the iPhone, and as expected it will automatically sync with the iPad. In short, it works just like the Kindle app does with the Kindle. I won’t say I’ll never use my Kindle app again, but iBooks will be my main reader on both my iPhone and iPad now.

I also wanted to share one of the more interesting pieces on first impressions of the iPhone 4. It comes from Kyle Baxter over at TightWinds, and it sums up my feelings nicely.

The iPhone 4 can be pre-ordered on June 15. I’ve already put it on my calendar.

Earlier today I posted about AT&T’s announcement of tethering, which has me most intrigued. The other part of the announcement — actually the main part of the announcement and what has received the most press — was that AT&T is changing the rates for their data plan.

Macworld has a great “What You Need To Know” piece, and you should definitely check it out. In a nutshell, here’s the gist for new iPhone users:

If you’re signing up for a iPhone as a brand new customer—and at this point, we’d recommend waiting until after the WWDC keynote to make any decisions—then you can opt for either the 200MB DataPlus plan for $15 per month or the 2GB DataPro plan for $25. If you want tethering, you’ll have to sign up for the DataPro plan, and tethering will cost you an additional $20 every month. Either way, however, you’ll also get access to AT&T’s nationwide network of 20,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in locations such as many Starbucks and airports.

If you are an existing iPhone user, like myself, you can keep the $30/month unlimited plan. After checking my AT&T usage, this is what I found:

As you can see, I regularly climb higher than 200MB/month, which really doesn’t matter since I will want tethering and must get the DataPro plan to qualify. And there, dear reader, is the rub.

If you are a current iPhone user with the $30/month unlimited plan and do not want tethering, all is well with the world. Nothing has to change, even if you upgrade to the new iPhone.

However, if you have an unlimited plan and want tethering, life is going to change. You have to have the DataPro plan. Granted, you’ll save $5/month for the first 2GB. If you stay under that limit, good on you! You just saved $5/month.

If, however, you exceed that 2GB limit, you’re dishing out another $10 for each 1GB you go over.

As for the overage charges, they are not bad compared to other networks. The comparison for current users, however, is not to other carriers but to our current carrier and what we’re paying. In other words, those of us who yearn for tethering will get screwed if we pass the 2GB usage mark.

At the end of the day, I can’t get too worked up over it. (Admittedly, I don’t expect to stream a lot of movies over 3G while tethered to my iPhone, though.)

The reason I can’t get worked up over it is that AT&T has to ensure that not only is their network viable but that it is able to expand as usage dictates. The only way to do that is to charge responsible amounts that both a) make it affordable to users and b) allow them to upgrade their network to meet increasing user loads.

That said, even with the DataPro plan, I have plenty of room to “grow” my usage when I start tethering to my MacBook (which is my main desire), my iPad (if possible but likely not) and perhaps other laptops (if multiple connections are allowed like with the Palm Pre).

AT&T announced today that they would finally offer tethering to iPhone customers, doing so a year after the feature became available on the iPhone for international users.

I try not to harp on AT&T too much, as I think all cellular carriers have problems, problems which would be grossly exaserbated if they were exposed to the massive user load of the iPhone.

What I’m most focused on is the fact that tethering is coming, and I couldn’t be happier. I got rid of my 3G connect card from AT&T quite a while ago because the amount I used it was not worth what I was paying.

As of recently, however, I’ve been faced with two new use-case scenerios where having a 3G/WiFi solution for multiple laptops has been created:

1. My travel has increased, and the need for WiFi connection for my MacBook has grown. Too, I often travel with a colleague. We both need to be on the Internet.
2. I purchased an iPad. I opted for the WiFi version because it was cheaper and because I know that I can use WiFi for most of what I need. Still, being able to get on the Internet via a 3G/WiFi solution would be nice.

Because of this, I’ve been contemplating a MiFi device. I’ve been holding off until the release of the new iPhone in hopes that AT&T would provide tethering. It seems, at least in part, my hopes are coming to fruition.

But a couple of questions still remain:

1. Will I be able to tether my iPad to my iPhone?
2. Will I be able to tether multiple devices to my iPhone?

The simple answer to the first question may be no, but it still may be possible with a third-party app. I’m not counting out the idea that Apple and AT&T will provide a solution to tether the iPad to the iPhone.

Regardless, one thing is certain: I’m upgrading from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 4 when it is released.

Ever since I knew the iPad was going to be a reality, I’ve dreamed of what it could do for print journalism.

Via the D8 Conference and AllThingsD:

Speaking at the D8 conference, the Apple CEO says that he wants to help save journalism because “I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself. I think we need editorial more than ever.” Ahem. Regardless, “What we have to do is figure out a way  to get people to start paying for this hard-earned content.”

OK. So how to do that? “Price it aggressively, and go for volume”, he says onstage at the D8 conference. When Apple hasn’t done that, he says “we get attenuated success”.

And if media companies follow his lead, he says, he can help them sell newspapers, magazines,  TV shows, etc.. But they’ll need to “take a more aggressive stance”  to pricing than they have to date.

The music industry is a prime example. They have belly-ached over the profit margins, but it is undeniable that Apple, iTunes and the iPod have revolutionized an industry that was starting to show signs of sagging.

Journalism is not dead, and I believe it is a cornerstone of a free society. What the iPad presents is the future of consuming media content. Here’s hoping that the print medium, of which I once belonged, takes better advantage of this platform than they did the Internet.

Patrick Jordan of Just Another iPhone Blog is responding to criticism over his not agreeing with $3 upgrade price for Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone:

I have just said that there should be a full price and a lower  ‘upgrade price’ for current users.  Or more accurately, because Apple does not make it possible to do things this way, there should be some equivalent of that worked out for current users.  Having seen the feedback on my post, some of it from developers, maybe this is not very viable.  If so, then it would be nice to hear from Atebits that they are at least exploring this, or have already done so.

Here’s his original post. Here’s what I wrote.

His response does little to change what was originally said, which is a generally short-sighted stance. (And I enjoy his blog, for what it’s worth. I just disagree on this.)

Newsgator has released NetNewsWire 2.0 for the iPhone, which now syncs with Google Reader, just like its desktop coounterpart. It also sports a new icon, itself an improvement over the 1.0 version.

In truth, I was not a fan of the first incarnation of NNW for the iPhone. It was slow to sync, which made it virtually unusable for me. Until now, I’v been using Google Reader’s iPhone interface, which is quite nice.

But no longer. NNW 2.0 for iPhone is just about perfect for what I need. It syncs and loads quickly. You can email an article or post it to Instapaper, as one would expect. However, with emailing, you never leave NNW, which means no delay in returning to your feeds once the email is sent. (Ditto for Instapaper.)

You can also post to Twitter without ever leaving NNW, which is a tremendous feature for those of us who like to share articles we’re reading with the Twitterverse.

The final nicety in NNW 2.0 for iPhone is the ability to choose which feeds are shown directly from the reader interface. This could be done in NNW 1.0 for iPhone, but you had to log into your Newsgator account and choose which feeds you wanted and didn’t want to sync. That was, at best, inconvenient, even more so if you were constantly adding and deleting feeds.

Now if you want to limit which feeds sync with your iPhone, then it is as easy as pressing a checkmark next to the feed name under the Show/Hide Feeds tab at the bottom of your feeds list. (Certainly some will argue that this would be better placed in a preference pane somewhere, but I like the choice of putting it where it is. It means one less button on a tool bar or saving users from having to go into the iPhone’s main Settings.)

The only complaint I have is a user preference with the UI. You can star any article by pressing the star icon on the bottom bar. However, at first I couldn’t tell that it was working because I was at the bottom of the article and the only visual cue to know that an article has been starred is that a star appears next to the headline at the top of the article.

I would much prefer the functionality of Tweetie when marking a tweet as a favorite. In Tweetie, the star icon is just an outline. When you press it to mark a tweet as a favorite, the star fills in. If you press it again to remove it as a favorite, the star returns to an outline. Under this scenario, regardless of where you are in the article you are reading, you will know if it has been starred.

In addition, a couple of other things could be added to make it more appealing to some users:

• An All Items view
• Clipped items from NNW (In fairness, there is no way yet to sync Clippings from NNW on your desktop to Google Reader)
• Shared items view

I’ve not read a lot about NNW 2.0, which appeared in the app store just yesterday. LifeHacker loves it, but Just Another iPhone Blog is unhappy with the new look and feel. For my taste, I love the clean, simple look it offers.

NNW 2.0 lives on my home screen, and it is now the iPhone RSS reader I’ve always hoped to have.

You can get a free version (iTunes link) that displays ads from The Deck. Or you can shell out $1.99 and get the premium version (iTunes link) sans ads. I’m usually a free app kind of guy, but I paid the $1.99 because this version finally delivers what I want.

I love my AppleTV, so I’m rooting for Apple to upgrade the device with new options, such as access to Netflix and Hulu. Of course, these things are doubtful. That doesn’t mean they can’t offer some worthwhile upgrades.

Until then, I just hope they don’t discontinue it. So today’s news of price drops for 160GB models and elimination of the 40GB models has people reading the tea leaves:

A $100 price drop is pretty significant for a device that originally cost $329 and the move is no doubt geared at trying aggressively to move some units during the upcoming holiday season. A price cut at this point also makes it pretty likely that there will be no hardware changes to the device in 2009. It is Apple, however, so you can never be too sure.

For me, I hope it’s a sign that what they have planned requires larger memory and that they are trying to make them ore affordable to make them more appealing.

Otherwise, the tea leaves say they are moving all remaining stock, will do nothing new with them and eventually we will see them die.

Come on Apple, do something good with this media device. Those of us who love them really love them. Others can and will with a few adjustments.

For me, the most exciting announcement from today’s Apple event was the introduction of Home Sharing:

Home Sharing brings iTunes synchronization to a home level. Up to now, it hasn’t been easy to synchronize iTunes between multiple computers without the use of scripts or third-party applications. Now up to five authorized computers in your house can copy songs, movies, and TV shows between them. You can see each of the computers operating as part of that shared group, stream each others’ contents and drag and drop content from one library to another.

Now I can keep my laptop and MacMini synced. That allows me to tether my AppleTV to my MacMini without anything missing. Finally!

Pixelmator is my favorite non-PhotoShop image-editing app. With the release of Pixelmator 1.5 comes a number of new features, including Save for Web:

Save for Web allows you to quickly save a compressed version of a file in a Web-friendly image format and file size. In true Pixelmator form, the new Save for Web dialog is simple and features some unique polish that makes it a joy to use.

I’m glad to see Save for Web, but I’m also equally glad to see these added features:

• Slice tool
• Added information to the Info Panel
• Send to Mail and iPhoto abilities

Pixelmator is not a PhotoShop replacement for professional designers, but it is getting better and better every day. I do most of my image-editing work in it, opening PhotoShop for only heavy lifting. With this new upgrade, I’ll have to open PS even less.

Pixelmator is also a gorgeous piece of software with a truly elegant UI. And considering that Pixelmator costs only $59, it is well worth a look. They have some great tutorial videos that show off what Pixelmator can do.

For a complete rundown of the new features in Pixelmator 1.5, visit the release notes.

I just downloaded the Flickr iPhone app (iTunes link), but I haven’t tested it. It looks great, and the feature set described is near perfect. To boot, it is free.

I’ll save passing judgement until later, but at least one early review is not glowing, that from John Gruber of Daring Fireball.

But man, is this app crashy for me. Crashed when I tried to upload an image. (Then it worked.) Crashed when I tried to snap a new photo from within the app. Tried twice again, crashed twice again. Three strikes and it’s out.

After a couple of days, we’ll see.

A rather long read from John Gruber at Daring Fireball on Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline.

They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are either in denial of, or do not perceive, that there has emerged a consensus — not just among nerds but among a growing number of regular just-plain users — that Windows PCs are second-rate. They still dominate in terms of unit-sale market share, yes, but not because people don’t recognize Windows as second-rate, but because they don’t care, in the same way millions of people buy metric tons of second-rate products from Wal-Mart every hour of every day.

That’s the business Wal-Mart wants to be in — selling a zillion cheap low-margin items and turning a profit on volume. That’s not the business Microsoft is in.

Worth the time you put into it. Five minutes. Tops.

Panic developer Steven Frank is mad as hell, and he ain’t taking it anymore:

There’s been no indication that Apple want to do anything to resolve the problems with app store policies that have been laid bare a hundred times over. There’s no indication of anything, as a matter of fact. Nothing. After a year. It’s a black hole yawning back at us. How much has been written about this over the last year? What reason is there to believe anything’s going to change in another year if the policies (whatever they are, who knows) seem to be just getting worse over time?

I’ve reached a point where I can no longer just sit back and watch this. The iPhone ecosystem is toxic, and I can’t participate any more until it is fixed. As people have told me so many times: It’s Apple’s ballgame, and Apple gets to make the rules, and if I don’t like it, I can leave. So, I don’t like it, and I’m leaving.

This is just one example of the rage against the iPhone App Store machine. It’s growing, and hopefully Apple will respond appropriately soon.

David Pogue of the NY Times has a few “Cellphone Gripes Worthy of Congress’s Time”:

Above all, though, you’ve got to wonder why, if Congress has time for things like cellphone gripes, it’s barking up this particular tree. Frankly, there are many other, much more whopping things that are broken, unfair and anticompetitive in the American cellphone industry.

It’s a good read, and he’s got some valid gripes. Now if we could get Congressional hearings into DSL/cable Internet service.

And my prayers were answered now that the guys at MacHangout.com have updated Glims for Safari 4b1.

I’m downloading the new version of Glims right now and am about to install.

I love Glims, and I am quickly falling in love with Safari 4.

Apple released their first public beta of Safari 4 today, and being the app junkie that I am, I gave it a spin.

My overall impression: Safari 4 has some good improvements — the least of which is not speed — but has nothing revolutionary.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s new in Safari 4:

1. Tabs: The most notable UI change is having tabs on top. I like it for the simple reason that adding and removing tabs does not distract from the viewing window. The downside is that with the tabs on top the ability to drag tabs around has changed slightly. You can only do so from a grip on the right side. There is also the added risk of accidentally closing a tab when you are simply trying to move the entire Safari window around.

2. Cover Flow. Cover Flow comes to Safari 4 in Top Sites (see below) and a full history search (see that below, too). I’m not a huge fan of Cover Flow, but I like it for the history search.

3. Top Sites. Top Sites puts your most visited sites in a cool little window. You can “pin” sites, which will always keep them there. I’m sure this will be used by some people, but I’m not sure how or if I’ll use it.

4. History View. You can now see the websites in your history using Cover Flow, which I find useful. The extra visual cue helps locate something I need but didn’t clip or bookmark in Delicious.

5. Smart Address Field. This is better implementation, giving you a top hit and page names with URLs when you are typing in an address in the URL field. Unfortunately, it is not as smart as Firefox, which would find http://www.apple.com/safari/ just by typing “safari” in the field.

There are a couple of weak points in Safari 4:

1. Plug-Ins. Safari 4 crashes — or, more accurately, does not launch — with certain plug-ins installed. For me, that was Glims. Even with search improvements in Safari 4, I still like the search shortcuts, additional site searches, tab controls and search when typing offered in Glims.

2. Page zooming. When I zoom in and out on a page, Safari hangs. That’s bad. In fact, that’s very bad.

If you want more information about Safari 4, I’d recommend having a look at these pages:

1. Apple’s Safari page: You can download Safari 4b1 from here.

2. 150 Features of Safari: This is Apple’s extensive list of Safari features, not all of which are new in Safari 4.

3. Hidden Preferences: Want your old tab bar back? How about the blue page loading status bar? This list will let you do that and more. (H/T Daring Fireball)

4. 1Password functionality. If you use 1Password, like I do, then you can use this little hack to get 1Password functionality in Safari 4b1. That said, the way the 1Password developers update their app, you’ll have the fix in and update within 24 hours. HA! They actually updated 1Password before I finished posting this. Just left this point to show how responsive the guys at Agile Web Solutions are.

5. MacWorld Review: It’s a review from MacWorld.

6. ArsTechnica Review: It’s a review. This time from ArsTechnica.

In the end, I like Safari 4, and I’m going to keep it loaded and use it as my default browser. I’m hoping Glims will add computability soon. Better yet, it would be nice if Apple would just add the functionality of Glims natively.