Apple is hosting a preview of the new iPhone OS 3.0 early next week. As an iPod touch owner, I’m already familiar with the sting of selective upgrades (apparently I’m not allowed to have Google Maps Street View). Hopefully I won’t be deprived of the worthwhile upgrades to come.

It occurs to me however that as someone who types words into a computer that are then published to a (somewhat) public-facing website, I am obligated to offer up a set of features I hope to see included in 3.0, and to then assert my imagined authority by calling them “predictions” instead of “wild guesses I just extracted from where I keep my poop”. So here’s one thing I’d like to see in iPhone OS 3.0:

Voiceover.

(via Daring Fireball)

The classic Amiga game, Pinball Dreams, has made its way to the iPod touch and iPhone. Brilliant.

After a delay due to sheer incompetence on the part of the courier driver, my new 32gb iPod touch is here. Woo. Needless to say I am posting this message from it right now and I must say that typing two-handed and using the auto correcting feature makes for some fairly simple typing. The complete lack of tactile response will certainly take some getting used to though.

The “Let’s Rock” media event is completed. Turns out the announcements were largely leaked beforehand. Unusual then that Apple was ‘quietly’ touting the event to media outlets as something special.

Personally I hope there are some speed and stability optimisations in iTunes 8, since the Genius recommendation feature couldn’t be less interesting to me. I have eclectic tastes. Last.fm can’t tell me what new music I’m going to like, Genius won’t either. I’m also not going to start downloading HD movies and TV shows from iTunes any time soon.

The curved iPod nano looks nice and all — I prefer the tall form factor to the short they went with last year. Whether the curving of the screen will cause distortion is a worrying question. The inclusion of the accelerometer is interesting, if only for the slightly dissonant control scheme. Switching from portrait to landscape also realigns the controls. Not a huge deal, but how intuitive it turns out is yet to be seen. Also, Apple can tout their efforts to create as environmentally friendly a nano as they can, but as long as they’re the #1 marketshare holder on a popular consumer product, Greenpeace is going to slap them for publicity.

The new nano’s are at 8gb and 16gb, at unsurprising prices. Which sadly suggested that the late rumour would be true: no iPod touch capacity bump. I shouldn’t be too disappointed, since the capacity I’m after (32gb) is already there. The internal speaker and physical volume buttons are greatly appreciated features. No GPS, which always sounded like a wishful feature (that I wasn’t wishing for). No camera, a wishful feature I was wishing for. They’ve stuck with their shiny iPod-ass too. Bastards. They also didn’t include a mic, but have introduced a new set of overpriced headphones with inline mic and controls. So that’s mixed. Maybe this will allow a Skype on the touch. Maybe not.

In general it’s a pretty routine round of updates. Not terrible, but not particularly interesting either. What was Apple’s “big news”? I can’t see anything there. The emphasis on iPhone/iPod touch as a gaming platform was curious, but just saying you’re competing with the DS and the PSP doesn’t make it so.

Apple has announced a media event for next Tuesday, September 9th. They don’t say it explicitly, but it’s new iPods. It’s always new iPods this time of year. More amusingly, the theme for the event is “Let’s Rock!”.

Presumably this will lead to a dramatically different stage presentation by Mr. Jobs.