Did you catch what the biggest change is to the iPhone 3G?
No, it is not the namesake 3G chip and it is not push email per se.
Apple has decided to replicate a portion of BlackBerry Server. This opens the iPhone up to outages similar to the ones Blackberry users experience when the BIS/BES servers go down.
The change I am talking about is the persistent connection to an Apple server to allow for push notifications. First, let me say that I think push notifications are bad ass. I have shown many iPhone users the brilliance of the Facebook app for Blackberry that implements a similar notification system. From the looks of the iPhone 3G demo it looks like Apple has recognized that notifications are a key feature and has found a way to improve on them.
I appreciate the way that Apple is using push notifications to handle part of the problem of “background tasks” (the other problem is persistence, which I assume they are addressing another way). However, I am not sure that Apple can really predict the popularity of these push notifications. I imagine that there will be push notifications delivered to my iPhone from Twitter, Whrrl, Facebook, IM, Google Docs, and more. It could be that the push notifications get so popular that Apple has a hard time keeping up with the demand.
It may be that it will never be an issue. It just scares me because this appears to be a single point of failure on what I think will be the iPhone 3G’s most used feature.
Prediction: Push notifications will be the single most used feature on the iPhone 3G. More than multi-touch, more than web browsing, more than MobileMe, more than even the phone.
Per Marc’s comment below this is actually an issue for all iPhones as of iPhone 2.0 and not just the iPhone 3G.
