All quiet on the Apple front for a while.  Macword 2009 was remembered for being, well, not that rememberable. Big Steve is on a leave of absence to get his health issues sorted.  And for once the blogs and fanboys seem to have died down a bit.  (Until this leaked photo appeared on Mac Rumours). Anyway fear not, becuase deep inside Cupertino, CA, Jonathan Ive is probably (99% certain), putting the finishing touches to his design for the iPhone 3rd generation.

Now I don’t have any mates that work at Apple or any inside info, gleamed from Kevin Rose or anything.  But as sure as Apples are Apples, there should be a new iPhone arriving this summer.  The mobile phone industry moves fast so going more than a year without an update to the iPhone would be inviting the likes of RIM, Android devices etc to start nipping at Apple toes.  Last year that monumental day was 11th July in the UK so expect to see Apple move the barriers on again around the same time this summer.

So the big question is, what are they going to do to make us all go out and exchange our 3G’s for a nice shiny new one and another 18 month contract.  Well first of all no matter how much I’d personally like to see one, Apple have officially confirmed there is no iPhone Nano in the immediate future.  Apparently Apple aren’t “going to play in the low-end voice phone business”.Sorry to break that but now that we’re over that check out some of the fake pictures that have been floating around recently.

Anyway without further adue, here are my predictions for the iPhone 3rd Generation…

My Predictions

- Video Calling via iChat camera (behind the screen if the patents are to be believed.
- Kickass camera (4MP at least).
- Further MobileMe cloud computing models, hedging my bets here.
- Cut and paste functionality – Come on Apple this is schoolboy.
- Stereo sound.
- Bluetooth.
- Higher Storage (32GB min?).
- Picture Messaging (MMS).

There we have it. For me the main new funtionality is going to be around video and sharing stuff via the cloud.  Feel free to tell me I’m speaking a load of b******s below.

Location based services are for me going to be one of the next big things in the digital space. The only thing is I’m not sure when! I’ve been following the area closely since I heard about Loopt 9 months ago. In the online advertising business we always say in January “this is going to be the year for Mobile”, and it never is. These two fields are inextricably linked and as soon as the latter gets critical mass then so will the former.

So what is a location based service. It is a service (i.e. social networking) accessible through mobile devices that utilises the ability to geographically triangulate the device location anywhere in the globe, i.e. on your Facebook news feed, imagine seeing, “Joe Bloggs is in Leicester Square, London”. Social Networking is going to be the thing that drives this. Kids at school, people lost at festivals, mates in the vicinity, the possibilities are endless. But the possibilities also extend in so many commercial ways that brands with retail presences must be liking their lips at the very thought. Then there’s this idea of social graffiti, i.e. leaving geo-tags on restaurants, shops, etc, that your friends can see, share and comment on. Imagine I want to go to a local restaurant, call it up on Google Maps, and I see a menu from the restaurant, and comments left from 3 of my friends who have been there. We all know that recommendations are that much more influential if they are from your friends. Applications like Brightkite are already doing this in a simplistic way, check out the video below.

The barriers to this service are wide ranging and entwined with all sorts of legal / privacy concerns. We saw the backlash start with the launch of Google Latitude and then continued with the Facebook privacy row. Google Latitude is a location based service that can be installed on most new smartphones, although notably not the iPhone at present. Google obviously have a vested interest in this sort of technology with their complementary product portfolio of namely Maps, Android and Gmail. However for once it’s not going to be Google that drives this. Whilst there are a multitude of services out there like Loopt, Brightkite, etc, the growth is going to come from the established social networks. You can bet that Facebook and MySpace have Silicon Valley’s finest working on this functionality in readiness. To bring this to the mainstream you have to have an established network of friends in place already.

So until Facebook pull their fingers out and get on with it, we can dream. The Tonchidot, Sekai Camera is one such example. Premiered at TechCrunch50 this App stole the show and although the designers seem a little thin on how they are going to populate this augmented reality experience it is clearly a vision of the future.  Enjoy…!