David

I’ve got to say and I think most folks would too, that I actually enjoy watching the keynote presentations from Apple and Steve Jobs. So here’s the lowdown… of course the anticipated Iphone 3G was announced and it goes up for sale on the 11th for a lower price at $199. This was the focus almost on the birthday of the original release. They also quietly announced the preview of upcoming Snow Leopard OS X during the conference. I’ve gone through all of this before, but i’ll say it again… Development for the iphone is super sweet with xcode. I’ve worked with it for about three months now, since they’ve released it. Let me just say the same thing as everyone else.. and while i’ve rarely ever worked on development for other mobile devices, i have no doubt in my mind that xcode is going to blow them away. They’re calling the the interface cocoa touch and I’m sure that it’s essentially the same as the old cocoa interface. The most important features include viewing all of course the 3G network, built in GPS, iwork and microsoft windows documents in the phone, the ability to save images from emails, the push email and sync capacities of Microsoft exchange for enterprise, some parental controls, a bunch of languages including character recognition, mobile me to push sync all devices with outlook/address/mail/web based and of course highlights from developers and their projects. They also got rid of the old headphone jack (hurah) and they went plastic on the back to lighten it up. I like the fact that the distribution for developers is absolutely free and an enterprise can verify phones so that only their apps can be run only on their phones. And now they are allowing of something they call “ad hoc” distribution that will allow you to distribute an app on up to 100 phones without using the app store.
What is also unique to the iphone vs other mobile devices is the “accelerometer” that works much like the controller of the Nintendo Wii console. This feature is what gives the screen the ability to rotate according the position that you are holding the phone and it in comparing it to other hand held gaming systems you are able to play games using the tilt features of the iphone. The built in GPS will allow some unique tools to be added to just about every mapping and social networking application that you already know. The associated press is releasing a mobile news platform that makes it easy to navigate video, images and text for their content on the iphone. Type pad presented how easy it is to blog with their software, but I’ll say that it’s just as easy with wordpress to do the same.

One part of the keynote that I would like to point out is that one of the developers featured illustrates a great point. One developer built a great application, not a team.. and in fact this guy actually works for the insurance industry and not professionally in a development capacity. I say that all the time to myself about web and software applications. Another feature of the keynote was medical applications. What is most important relative fact about these mobile apps is imaging. I know for a fact that imaging is very important the medical industry and the iphone capitalizes on this with it’s display capabilities. Since the majority of us aren’t as concerned about how our doctors will be accessing our medical imagery.. what will matter is that Major league baseball will be releasing video highlights as they happen for all major league baseball games and i’m pretty sure that most other professional sports organizations will follow.
During the keynote, they took a straight jab at the Windows ethic by pointing out that no applications will allow background processes to suck up your phones memory. They pointed out that windows mobile requires users to manage their own cpu cycles. (not good) In doing so the iphone will scale to allow apple to use a push notification service that only requires on IP connection to streamline push messaging from applications. They’re also taking the direction of cloud computing with mobile me. It’s essentially a take off of .mac (which it replaces and users will be updated to mobile me) but with applications that can push to any device and software.
The demo of the web application looked like it might take a go at google apps and I imagine that the web application is going to big hit especially for new mac users. I’m a bit skeptical of sharing all of this information online but apple is certainly making it compelling to most users that a synced experience will make using email, file sharing, calendars online is going to make your life easier.. and of course they’re going to give out trials.
Jobs must be under the influence by the Disney thing.. as he wrapped it all up with “it’s a small word after all” while illustrating that they added 70 new countries worldwide for distribution. And the new advertisement is once again “Apple Marketing-licious” I’m speculating that they’re go from 6 million phones to 25 million phones within the year… that’s a 500% jump in market share for those of you counting.