Apple gets it mostly right with the new 3G iphone which is good news for mobile marketers

Finally the wait is over.

Your new iphone is coming July 11th and it’s twice as fast as the one you bought in Buffalo a year ago and half the price – making this a device made for the masses.

It’s also coming with pretty much everything we were hoping for. My predictions were mostly right – 7.5 out of 9. The .5 was for saying the new phone would look different… I guessed that the new battery for 3G would make it a thicker device and we now know it will be thinner!

Some are disappointed that the new iphone isn’t coming with a front facing camera (for video chat), or a flash – or even a better camera. Nokia has a 5 meg camera with the N95… couldn’t we at least have a 3 meg camera?

Mobileme is a new feature that looks really interesting. Similar to other services i’ve seen such as SugarSync, Mobile me essentially allows you to synchronize your email, contacts, calendar and documents across multiple computers and your iphone. It also comes with push email – so like the blackberry, you will be instantly notified when email comes in. You even get your own login at me.com (I wonder how much they paid for that domain!) where you can access all your info through a web interface – much like MS Exchange today if you are on a corporate infrastructure.

Besides the business / enterprise updates, there wasn’t much to get excited about on the software front – but that’s ok. The official and non-official developer communities will fill in any missing pieces like they did with the first generation phone.

Having said that, it’s very cool that loopt is now part of the iphone 2.0 platform. Loopt is a mobile social networking platform that incorporates location. I blogged about this months ago here when i said the future of social networking is creepy. At the time i was more jazzed about a similar product from Alcatel called geopepper.

What is interesting is that Steve Jobs used the Treo 750 and Nokia N95 as comparison devices for loading webpages. It’s interesting because he didn’t mention 2 new products that will challenge Apple for downloading speed; the new blackberry bold and thunder (expected to be out this fall) as well as the new Nokia N96 which is a faster & updated version of the N95.

The new iphone, or iphone 2.0 or 3G iphone is a huge leap forward from the first version released over a year ago, but it’s still not the mostly technically advanced or sophisticated when compared to devices that are already on the market.

Having said that, who cares.

It’s not about the technology, it’s about the experience. Like I’ve said before, a great user experience will trump great technology and Apple has improved on something that was already pretty super awesome.

Why is that good news for Marketers?

Consider this… 98 percent of iphone users are browsing online, 94 percent are using email and 90 percent are texting. Approximately 80 percent are using 10 or more of the phone’s features.

For marketers who think mobile marketing is only about text 2 win campaigns, the introduction of the iphone and other competing products this year will make the mobile device a rich environment to acquire, retain, or grow customers beyond the 100,000 or so iphones that already migrated here in the last year.