If you are a registered iPhone developer, you can now download the beta version of the OS. The beta was unfortunatly released under NDA, so I cannot yet comment too much on it, but you can watch the full presentation by Scott Forstall (Senior VP iPhone Software) and Greg Joswiak (Senior VP iPhone/iPod Marketing) to get an idea of what’s coming.
As someone who now owns an iPhone, an Android G1 and a Blackberry curve, I can say that I’m really excited about what 3.0 will bring. To me, it really feels like Apple managed to fix 75% of what was clearly missing from the platform. Stuff like Copy/Paste was an obvious flaw, but the “1000 new APIs” that Apple announced will certainly have the biggest impact on the future of the platform. I really believe that applications will be quite a bit better once a few weeks go by and developers have a chance to update their applications.
I must say, I really wasn’t expecting this much and don’t take the (relatively small) amount of new end-user features alone when judging the 3.0 update.
Productivity
iphone, opinion
If you live, well, on earth I guess you are probably aware that January the 20th is inauguration day for Barack Obama. A new President who, if anything, is well aware of the power of social networking (or at least someone on his team is) and likes his Blackberry a lot. Barack’s use of Twitter and Facebook over the past year was impressive but as he takes his oath on Tuesday afternoon, the impressive use of technology won’t come from him nor his team but from the good people over at UStream.
UStream.tv is a site that allows you to broadcast live video on the Web for free. That’s impressive, but it’s been available for a while (competitors Qik and Stickam do similar). What’s cool though is that UStream has just launched today their first iPhone/iPod Touch app. This free application is a video viewer and streams the video over WiFi (only) and let’s you watch any video content on UStream on your iPhone. The app comes just in time since the site will have a number of live streams all day on Tuesday for Obama’s inauguration.
I know what you’re thinking. No, the app doesn’t allow you to record video. Unfortunately, Apple has not yet allowed anyone to record video with the iPhone. QIK, a similar service that allows anyone to broadcast from their phone (works great with an N95 for example) has the application ready and is awaiting Apple’s GO.
Social Networks, Software
iphone, ustream, video
If there’s one thing we can say about Apple, it’s that the company knows how to launch a product and affect an entire industry. Wether it is in 2001 with the iPod, in 2003 with the iTunes (Music) Store or in 2007 with the iPhone, Apple has been making a big impact in the consumer electronics world these past few days.
Some of my current iPhone apps
The lastest proof of that is the Application Store for the iPhone platform (including iPod Touch). I’ve been buying a lot of stuff in there these past few months, but it’s evident that there’s a lot of quality software in there. I still remember the not so distant days when I was trying to buy Palm OS applications on Handango or worse still, Blackberry apps two years ago.The App Store has really changed everything in that regard. Just take a look at the launch for the Palm Pre— the first thing Palm did was to say there would be an integrated App Store at launch. Google did the same when it launched the Android platform a few months ago.
While there’s a lot of free applications in there, there’s also a ton of paying ones too and their associated success stories we’ve been hearing these past few days (iFart for example). The $0.99 price point is proving to be quite popular and quite a money maker. If you rank #1 in the iTunes Store on any given day, you are probably selling around 15-18K copies of your software per day. If you consider that most of these apps are developed by a single person or a very small team, it doesn’t take a long time to recoup your investment.
If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch (and who doesn’t these days?), check out the “Best iPhone games” according to TouchArcade or maybe even the best iPhone apps ever or, better yet, my list of favorites:
Off topic
application, iphone, ipod touch
