So this Tuesday, St. Patrick's Day, Apple is going to have an event to demo the newest revision of the iPhone's operating system.  Presumably this will just be a technical event to show new features to developers, and then at WWDC they'll actually go live with OS 3.0.  At any rate I don't feel like doing a speculation post, rather I'm going to say what I hope will happen.  It probably won't, but here's what I hope goes down.

I desperately need a new phone.  My current phone, a Samsung u740, is about 2 years old and is starting to give me some trouble.  Worst of all?  The battery lasts about 30 minutes these days.  I've spoken multiple times about getting the next generation iPhone when it comes out, but what I'm most concerned about is that the next edition of the iPhone will be unveiled at WWDC in June but it won't actually be released until later in the year.  That would kill me.

So what I'm hoping will happen is that Apple will actually unveil the hardware at this event on Tuesday, and then at WWDC the phone will be available for purchase.  Even putting it off for that long will be kind of a stretch for me, but I'm willing to wait at least that long.  Anyways, what I'm banking on is that there will be significant enough changes to the iPhone's hardware or features that they'll have to demo it now so that developers will be able to hit the ground running when the phone comes out in June.  Will this happen?  Probably not, but it would be nice.

Either way this Tuesday should be pretty exciting.  It goes without saying that one of the iPhone's biggest competitors is on its way to the market (Palm Pre), and it would be a classic move by Apple to up the ante completely just before the competition catches up with a comparable device.  Remember when Microsoft's Zune came out?  Everyone was shocked that there was finally some solid competition in the MP3 player space, and then a few months later Apple debuts the iPhone and the game completely changes.  Maybe the next version of the iPhone and its software will have a similar affect on the smartphone market.