Apple's iPhone: Playing Catch-Up

Steve Jobs introduced the second-generation iPhone today at the Apple Developers' Conference in San Francisco. In front of a packed house, Jobs laid-out his company's plans for total world market-share domination.

Think of today's announcement as catching-up. It was something like a baseball team that has lots of talent but is a few games out of first place. Today, Apple(AAPL) may have tied the game, and possibly loaded the bases for the big come-from-behind win. But they didn't win it.

Today's announcements are a direct shot at the current smart-phone leaders: Research in Motion's(RIMM) Blackberries, Microsoft's(MSFT) Windows Mobile devices and Palm's(PALM) Treo and Centro phones.

The biggest feature announcement was predicted by everyone. It's the new hardware, a 3G iPhone. Aside from complaints about the original phone's speed, if Apple wanted to continue selling lots of iPhones they needed to make the new phone a 3G design -- so that it worked everywhere on the planet. Some countries in the Far East really don't handle EDGE data all that well.

$199 iPhone Spells Trouble for Rivals

On the outside, the new iPhone 3G bears a huge resemblance to the first-generation phone, but it does a whole lot more. It will sell for a lot less: $199 for the 8GB model; $299 for the 16GB version. The official release day will be July 11.

There's a slew of new features to tell you about:

1. Enterprise Mail: Allows Windows Exchange Mail and Cisco VPN security settings (announced a few months ago).
2. Built-in GPS
3. Accelerometer (allowing you to control cursor movement by moving entire phone)

Available software programs includes:

• TypePad: A blogging tool
• AP Mobile News tool
• Band: Make music on tour cell phone
• Major League Baseball (Scores and highlights)
• New Games (many of them including some 3D titles)
• Modality: (Human body parts for med students)
• MIMvista: Body scans for doctors
• PowerPoint support (to go with Word and Excel support)
• Contact Search
• Bulk delete/Move function

All of this new software will be rolled into a package called iPhone 2.0, which will be available in July, for free for all current iPhone owners. It will cost $10 for iTouch owners.