The new 3GS is promised to have improved performance that will outpace the processing power of current-release iPhones, but the tangible hardware-exclusives are not worth the unsubsidized price-point current 3G owners will have to shell out.

3GS owners will have a built-in compass (ummm…), built-in video recording, editing and upload (something that admittedly has me drooling, but is also a first-gen release), and a new 3MP camera (again… for serious pics, I’m using my REAL digital camera and not a phone). That leaves improved performance of apps like Safari, Mail, etc. as selling points, and THAT is not enough to make me want to upgrade.

Come OS3.0 day, iPhone 3G owners will effectively end up with brand new phones – complete with landscape keyboard in key apps, push notifications, tethering, MMS, new APIs which will equal hot new apps, and more. For a guy like me who tweets, checks Facebook, ends the occasional e-mail and surfs the web a bit, OS3.0 will be all the upgrade I need… for now.

So – how long should one wait to upgrade hardware? I don’t know about you, but I’m waiting until:

- video editing gets a solid point revision
- I can’t run 3rd party killer apps on the 3G hardware
- iChat and iSight come to the iPhone
- a major OS overhaul which requires new hardware
- my current phone breaks (knock on wood, this won’t happen in the next 25 months)

In short – to all my iPhone 3G friends… wait! 3GS may be faster and have a couple of new bells and whistles… but I don’t believe it is necessary to change hardware just yet!

Sent from my iPhone 3G.

+J

1) Flash support on iPhone. Adding Flash support is a double edged sword for the Jesus Phone. Upside is that we all can enjoy services like Hulu (in the US) and other flash-based media streaming services. Downside is the bandwidth that might get consumed as a result. Might get REAL easy to use up a 6GB data plan…

2) Cut & Paste. I haven’t really gotten on the cut-and-paste-on-the-iPhone bandwagon until I started using Twitter real heavily on my iPhone. Simply put… Posting URLs inside iPhone-based Twitter clients is painnnnful.

3) TV room killer. Yep… Boxee is pretty cool. But DVDs are so passé. As much as I want to be all-Apple-VOD, I might want to pop in a Blu-Ray disc every once in a while. And I might even want to watch Anderson Cooper on PVR at 2am. Apple TV has a great interface… But it needs a take-three to get it right.

4) Multitouch in the home. I want multitouch on my next iMac. Period.

5) Better TV lineups in Canada & abroad. It isn’t fair that our US friends can toss away cable and live off Apple TV and Netflix on the 360 and we’re stuck watching 3 year old catalog shows from Comedy Central. Really… “Strangers with Candy” and “Stella” weren’t *that* funny.

6) Sideways mail on the iPhone. Really, I shouldn’t have to turn to third party software to make mail typable in landscape mode.

7) iMovie for not-dummies. The traditional, broadcast-standard timeline approach to editing video is not hard to learn or understand. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel! And rename the damn thing! It should be a product line : Final Cut Home, Final Cut Express, and Final Cut Studio.

Oh… And one more thing…

Wireless sync between iTunes and iPod Touch/iPhone. That would SO rock!

But all that will have to eait until (hopefully) the next Apple “event”…