“The iPhone is no longer a mobile handset. Today, Apple announced its transformation into a truly mobile computing platform,” Joe Wilcox blogs for eWeek.
“Apple showcased iPhone 3.0 OS at an event [Tuesday, March 17] on its Cupertino campus,” Wilcox writes. “Apple previewed some of the 100 new features and promised 1,000 new APIs. The new features and APIs will let developers tap deeper into iPhone OS and extend capabilities outward. More importantly, iPhone 3.0 promises to extend what developers will be able to do with their applications, such as better tap into location-based and mapping services, offer in-app purchases and make available peer-to-peer gaming.”
Wilcox writes, “If the promises Apple made today bear out—and it’s not always immediately obvious because the marketing hype is so thick—iPhone will become the next-generation computing platform developers have been waiting for.”
“Before continuing, I must dispel an urban legend that Apple launched a preemptive strike against Palm,” Wilcox writes. [Tuesday’s] iPhone 3.0 event wasn’t about Palm Pre. I’ve read lots of bad armchair analysis about how Apple is trying to get in front of Pre. What planet are you people living on? The Pre isn’t that exciting or innovative, and it’s not even shipping. Meanwhile, according to Gartner, Palm smartphone shipments are free falling. Pre is no threat to iPhone, certainly not yet and probably never.”
Wilcox writes, “Apple has an advantage over all other mobile platforms and something not really seen since the early days of DOS/Windows: A unified platform. As I explained last month: Rather than there being multiple mobile OS versions, further fragmented by carrier distribution, Apple controls and distributes the updates. There is one iPhone OS version for all devices, and new updates are immediately available for all iPhones regardless of carrier. BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile are hugely fragmented mobile operating systems. Android is moving that way.”
“Apple’s timing for maturing iPhone is exactly right. I’ve repeatedly asserted that the mobile phone will replace the PC as the primary computing device used by most people—and it’s always on, too,” Wilcox writes. “The mobile phone’s future is inevitable. It’s not a question of if but when it replaces the PC, and there’s still the unanswered question which device/platform becomes the de facto developer/content/consumption standard like Windows is for PCs. Apple is bringing some of the best development attributes of the personal computer to iPhone and priming the device to make a plausible grab for PC’s crown.”
There’s much more in the full article – recommended – here.