WWDC and iPhone 3G Release
There’s no question that Apple’s launch of the iPhone last year changed the handset market and raised the bar for mobile technology and interaction.
The big news Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco was of course CEO Steve Jobs’ announcement of a 3G version of the iPhone.
So, the speculation of many bloggers and news channels has been replaced by the hard facts of the iPhone release. US and UK customers will be able to get the new phone from July 11th. Callender Creates provide the need to know facts from the WWDC.
The rise of the iPhone and the demise of the ‘smart’ phone
I love the statistics behind an industry, watching trends, and so on. And yesterday saw AppleInsider publish a table from Gartner’s new stats on worldwide smartphone sales in Q1, 2008. It’s only a summary of the top 5 manufacturers, but it makes interesting reading. Nokia are top, of course, with their Symbian-based S60 smartphones selling 14.6 million units in Q1, with a fast-moving RIM in second place on 4.3 million units. And, the point of Apple Insider’s article, Apple are a relatively new entry at number 3, having overtaken all other established smartphone makers to achieve worldwide sales of 1.7 million in the quarter. So that’s HTC, Sharp, Sony Ericsson and Motorola all beaten comfortably by the new contender from Cupertino.
What’s especially notable from the statistics is that Nokia and Apple don’t market their ‘smartphones’ as such. (more…)
Obligatory 3G iPhone speculation (software)
Not long to go now – at 6pm UK time on Monday the new iPhone(s) will be revealed. I’ve already wondered about the hardware, but what lies ahead for the new software? Much functionality will be added through third party applications, but what can only Apple add, in the core of OS X iPhone?
What do we already know?
Leaks of the development builds have already shown that OS X iPhone 2.0 will include:
- Exchange support (inc. ActiveSync & remote wipe)
- geo-tagging of photos
- email mass delete
- full-screen Safari (effectively a widget platform)
- Bonjour (zero-configuration networking)
- playing of embedded YouTube video in web pages
- saving web images to the phone
…and probably some more bits that I’ve missed. This is all great. From a consumer perspective, there are a few important items that I would also like to see Apple nail in the new firmware.