Highlights from Apple’s iPhone 3.0 event:
• End of event (and of others, including Palm).
• iPhone OS 3.0 will be available this summer as free update for all iPhone 3G and original iPhone customers; US$9.95 for iPod touch users.
• App store is now available in 15 new countries for a total of 77 of the 80 countries in which iPhone is sold
• iPhone 3.0 developer beta available today
• Oh, but there’s more, much more: Note Sync, Auto-Fill, YouTube accounts, Safari anti-phishing, stereo Bluetooth, Shake to shuffle, WiFi autologin, VPN on-demand, Media scrubber, EAS policies…
• Spotlight comes to iPhone: universal search: Mail, Calendar, iPod, etc. Adds search pane to left of the first page of your apps
• Stocks app upgraded: details, news articles, and landscape view
• Calendar additons: CalDAV, subscriptions – .ics support
• New app: Voice Memos
• Landscape keyboard support comes to all apps
• MMS support
• Now users can select multiple photos and copy and paste them into a single Mail message, too
• In Safari, press on a section of a webpage and it will select blocks of text for copying. It copies the html including styles and links. Just shake iPhone and it’ll let you choose to undo or redo.
• Then, you guessed it, Copy, Cut, or Paste.
• Adjust selection with magnifying glass
• Double tap to select, give you a “Cut Copy Paste” pop-up bubble
• Cut, Copy and Paste! Demo via “Oceanic Flight 815” email. Accessible to all apps, not just Mail. Minimal or no work for devs to bring it to their apps.
• Playing ‘Phantom of the Opera’ on Leaf Trombone
• smule (Ocarina maker) demos new multiplayer music app: ‘Leaf Trombone: World Stage’
• In-app Commerce API will be a big deal
• ngmoco’s Touch Pets (social “pet” game) and LiveFire (first-person shooter with multiplayer option) gaming demos…
• LifeScan Diabetes app: Lifescan’s glucose meter transmits info to iPhone via Bluetooth
• ESPN app offers new media player that automatically adjusts quality based on your available bandwidth. Sports scores pushed to iPhone
• Forestall notes: iPhone ranks #1 among business users according to JD Power
• Devs demo some work they’ve done with early access to iPhone 3.0 that Apple has given them (Meebo, EA’s ‘Sims for iPhone,’ Oracle, ESPN, etc.)
• Example: play music from your iPod library in the game you are playing
• More APIs: In-App email, iPod library access, streaming audio & video, proximity sensor access, in-game voice chat…
• Therefore, Push Notification will be the way to update non-running apps which preserves battery life, maintains performance, and is optimized for mobile networks
• Background processes are bad for the customer; significantly drains battery
• Push Notification: Apple’s Scott Forstall: “We expected to have this last year, but we didn’t. There are reasons for this. Within months of launching the App Store, we had thousands’s of apps. And a lot of developers came to us and talked about using push in ways that we hadn’t even considered. So we had to re-architect the server structure. Now, we’re good to go.” Push Notification is scalable.
• Enabling developers to use core location for turn by turn directions
• APIs enable accessory developers to build custom apps that communicate directly to hardware via Dock Connector
• Automatically discovers running apps, wirelessly via Blutetooth
• Peer to peer connectivity (Rendevous, er… Bonjour) iPhones and iPod touches can auto-discover other devices for games, sharing contact info, etc.
• Subscriptions, new levels: devs can now charge to extend, for examples, magazine subscriptions, additional game levels from within apps
• iPhone OS 3.0 will feature 1000 new APIs
• Over 25,000 apps, 96% of apps that have been submitted, 98% were approved in under 7 days
• 60% of those devs have never developed for any Apple platform before
• Over 50,000 companies and individuals joined as iPhone/iPod touch developers
• Over 800,000 downloads of the free iPhone SDK(s) to date (8 months)
• Apple’s Greg Joswiak (VP, iPod Marketing): Over 17 million iPhones sold to date, over 30 million iPhone and iPod touch units altogether so far
