It would basically just be catching up to the jailbreak dev community from 2008. It is sad that Apple's restrictions limits and slows down its overall potential.
I think Apple got blind-sided by Android runaway train during CES and I don't think this year's update will be anymore major than from last summer. Notice how the Verizon announcement instantly came right after those super new Android phones got announced. I see Apple just trying to expand their iPhone 4 marketshare with the Verizon announcement and then focus heavily on the iPad 2. The real iPhone and iOS update will be in 2012. It is like following your fav team. After winning a championship, you can't expect them to win it every single year. Or in TV shows, at some point (ala The Simpsons), it gets sickening after awhile and already jumping the shark. Apple didn't have enough time to reload and just rested on its laurels like anybody feeling complacent about success. Look at Nokia back in 2007.
This is Android's year. At some point, iPhone sales will reach a saturation point and everybody else would want to try something different. Not like Apple has really been relevant for more than 10 years. Not since the iPod have they been popular to the masses. Sony had a great 10+ year run with their PlayStation brand before everybody started bashing them in 2006.
I was thinking about the whole jailbreak thing and how people are always saying how you can't do this or that without jailbreaking, and how this or that suck on the iphone etc, etc. Well for most people that don't care, and just want their phones to work, the stock iPhone works great, for those of us who like to tinker and theme, well we can put whatever we want on the phone. My iPhone 4 has widgets, Android style notification system, and is customized throughout to my liking, so it's not so bad I guess. You can't download a program that will increase your Androids resolution or turn it's cheap plastic into steel..
And as far as Apple being blind sided by the announcements at CES this year, I couldn't disagree more, huge corporations like Apple and Google know far more about what eachother are doing than the general public knows. And it's almost comical watching the news and reading all the tech sites this week. Why? Well this is the first year I've paid any attention to CES, and what have I noticed? It seems as if Apple has gotten more press than Google or anybody else by them
not being there, it's like every story written about CES starts off with something about Apple, the iPad, or the Verizon iPhone. Sure the geeks have memorized every detail of every Android phone announced, but you know what most people heard? Well they probably heard what I did on the local news here in so Cal last night. It went something like this: Bunch of new gizmos and gadgets, not really any focus on who makes different gizmos and gadgets, then they show people playing with different tablets as news guy says there's been a flood of iPad copycats announced, and then they finish it off showing someone playing with yup, you guessed it, an iPhone! So I thought the whole thing was pretty funny, Apple pretends CES doesn't exist, yet the spotlight is still on them (at least it seems that way). And now we have confirmation that the Verizon iPhone is being unveiled next week, and already everybody has forgotten about the Androids and Motorola "Xoom's".
Oh and it's not like everybody at Apple works on the same thing, one project at a time, last year we got an all new phone along with the release of the iPad, why would they not be able to work on a new phone because of an iPad re-fresh???
And there's always Steve Jobs compulsion to stay ahead of the competition, I remember many people predicting doom and gloom for the iPhone from this time last year until WWDC. It was all about the Evo, man there must have been a thousand posts a day about how the iPhone was dead, and that the Evo was the king and all that stuff. Apple was just gonna sit back and enjoy making more cash off all the "suckers" who would run out and buy their iPhone 3GS2 because it has a Apple logo on it, while Android would clean their clock. And then we got the iPhone 4, suddenly nobody wanted an Evo anymore.
Watch those predictions, same thing might happen again, and sure, Apple could always screw up and put out a dud, but remember, when they last made a minor upgrade back in 08 with the 3G, there wasn't really any competition either. Now there is.
