Congratulations Apple, you have done it again. Not only did you place a cloud over CES two weeks ago by leaking just enough information about your upcoming event, but you have now got both new and old media buzzing about next week’s announcement regarding your new tablet even before there has been confirmation that there is a new tablet.

Better still, you worked your magic in such a way that anything and everything that occurs between now and then is going to be seen through the lens of “Apple tablet anticipation”. I mean, the number of electrons that have been spilled writing about all of the features that you will reveal next week would be understandable if they were rooted in fact but the fact is, more than 90% of what we’re reading about is nothing more than guesswork and lazy online writers repeating the same nonsense so many times that it eventually looks to the fact. (Seriously, one site reports that you might be replacing Google’s search engine with Microsoft’s and everybody covers it as if it were fact. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that the competition has heated up enough that this is something you might be considering. But the chances we don’t know anything right now and we won’t until you actually announce something.)

In fact, just yesterday Elana said, “I assume you have heard about the cool stuff Apple is revealing next week? I keep hearing about that on the radio.”

You have suckered me into “Apple tablet anticipation” far too many times in the past few years and while I am looking forward to seeing what you unveil next week I’m not holding my breath that anything we are reading right now is true. We will know it when we know it. And we won’t know it until you want us to know it.

I am, however, a bit concerned. I expect you will reveal an amazing new piece of hardware and the next generation of OS iPhone but no matter how many new bells and whistles there are there are some basic things you really need to take care of now and i suspect you won’t. I, for one, can’t encourage you enough to make sure that you get back to basics before moving forward but I don’t expect that to happen.

What am I talking about? A few things that you need to fix now.

First, you need to make the iPhone more durable. The first-generation iPhone was a thing of beauty. It was amazing to behold, it was an even greater revolution in technology than we realized at the time, and it was durable. The solid metal of the phone felt great in the hand and made a clear statement that you are in this for the long haul. Sure, the metal would dent if you dropped the phone and the recessed headphone jack was a pain in the neck, but not one of those original iPhone’s bodies cracked. In fact, I would bet that with the exception of broken screens the majority of those phones are still in decent enough shape.

Not so with the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS. The phone feels cheaper. It certainly doesn’t have the cachet of the first-generation iPhone thanks to the relatively cheap plastic back compared to the solid aluminum body of the earliest device. And it cracks constantly. I replaced my iPhone 3G twice — and I treat my phones with great care. Larry just swapped his iPhone 3GS out and Judie needs to do the same thing. The phone just isn’t a solid piece of hardware anymore and that needs to change.

I understand that the change to the back made of plastic help you make the phone less expensive and was intended to boost the signal reception but in the process you made the phone feel cheaper.

Second, would you please improve the signal reception?? I understand that you may have put the plastic back on the iPhone to increase the signal reception. It didn’t work. My iPhone gets far worse signal reception than my Blackberry or my new Nexus One (and the next one isn’t anything to write home about in the cell phone reception area.) If the iPhone is going to be the ubiquitous pocket computer it needs to get better reception than it currently does. How about putting your technological team on that one instead of adding more bells and whistles to the user interface?

Third, and this is the biggie, would you please improve the battery life. Seriously the battery life is awful. It’s bad bad bad. Sure, if you turn off WiFi and 3G and you barely use any applications it will serve you well for an entire day. But that’s not the point of carrying an iPhone. The point of carrying the iPhone is to be able to use all the applications you have downloaded and to get the fastest speed possible when the polling data from the web. If you don’t improve the battery life but you make the new iPhone faster and able to render graphics with even greater clarity and speed the device will become close to useless for any power user. (Okay that last statement was an overstatement but you get my point.) Apple, you are brilliant. You have a fantastic design sense and great engineers. These three areas — durability, reception, and battery life are three of the most basic things that need to be part of the next iPhone. How about focusing on those?

And while you’re at it, would you please do something about all of the ridiculous buzz — seriously, how many sites need to parrot back the rumor that you are talking to Microsoft? Please, enough static already.

I can’t wait until next week comes. Not only because I’m anxious to see what you have to revealed to us but because only then will the ridiculous rumor buzz disappeared. Then again, it only be replaced by those people who are whining about what you didn’t reveal, shouldn’t have done, or still need to do.