“On Tuesday, Apple held a special event on their corporate campus to take the big blue tarp off of iPhone 3.0 [software],” Andy Ihnatko writes for The Chicago Sun-Times.
“Hardware accessories will move way, way beyond car chargers and headphones,” Ihnatko writes. “Under iPhone OS 3.0, third-party software can have a far more intimate relationship with a device connected to the phone’s dock connector… Maps will appear in every app where they can be the slightest bit helpful… Apple also used this occasion to announce that turn-by-turn navigation had been taken off of the App Store’s no-fly list.”
“Under iPhone OS 3.0, you can keep multiple apps running at the same time! Kind of… Apple blanches at the potentially devastating cost in battery life. A chat app (for example) keeps the CPU active all the time, so it can constantly wait for incoming chats. Background apps make additional demands on the device’s limited resources, they slow down every other running app, and things can crash, and … well, people get upset,” Ihnatko writes. “Apple’s ‘kind of multitasking’ solution is something they call ‘push notification.’ Just as a mail server can push a new email into the Mail app without requiring the phone to explicitly check in with the server all the time, third-party developers will be able to create snippets of remote code that quietly alert the sleeping app that Something Of Interest Has Happened.”
“Once you’ve bought an app, you’ll be able to buy enhancements for that piece of software without having to leave the iPhone and install something from your desktop,” Ihnatko writes. “It seems like the most venal of iPhone 3.0’s new features, but potentially it’s one of the most significant.”
Ihnatko writes, “At long, luxurious last, the iPhone will understand the concept of ‘cut, copy and paste.’ It’ll be a system-wide feature that works across all apps and data types… iPhone 3.0 greatly expands Bluetooth support. Apple was eerily quiet on the specific question of support for wireless keyboards but confirmed that peer-to-peer beaming of contacts as well as A2DP stereo bluetooth audio were both supported.”
Ihnatko writes, “Apple demonstrated the iPhone’s new Spotlight screen, which will be located just to the left of your first page of application icons. Flick to the left and you’re looking at a search field which will scan your phone for any text. It’ll search through emails, notes, songs in your iTunes library, names of applications… Oh, and the day isn’t far off when you’ll be able to use your iPhone as an Internet connection for your notebook. Apple confirmed that data tethering was definitely part of iPhone 3.0, though they cautioned that actual support for that feature was largely in the hands of AT&T and the iPhone’s other worldwide wireless partners.”
Read more in the full article here.
