In “Welcome to fragmentation-land Apple“, Ben Smith of The Really Mobile Project has commented on a consequence of the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement. Ben points out that your favourite fruit-logo’d mobile maker will not be providing the oldest iPods and iPhones with the latest operating system. So for the first time we’ll have some iPhones running 3.x firmware, and some running the 4.x release. Oh, and don’t forget iPads will be thrown into the mix.

I want to have a look at this in more detail, and see what it means for both developers and users. Is fragmentation of the iPhone platform all that bad?

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The dust has settled, mostly. Apple have made their big iPhone OS 3.0 announcement – covered very well by posts at Intomobile and iPhone, Therefore I Blog. The video podcast of the announcement has been released. And those who have installed it are rapidly finding more than Apple was prepared to demonstrate on Tuesday – internet tethering, finding your lost iPhone, better podcast scrubbing, uploading video. iLounge has a great gallery of screenshots.

Personally, I’m glad some of the frustrating omissions from iPhone OS are being filled (MMS, handling vCards, cut ‘n’ paste). It’s basic stuff but it makes a difference when it’s not present. But aside from filling in the blanks, what did Apple really announce on Tuesday?
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Up until about a month ago, I’d been very impressed by the way the App Store app (if you see what I mean) kept me up to speed with updates to my installed applications. However, I’m now as wary of App Store’s claimed updates as I would be of a cornered lion…
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On the 9th September at 10am Pacific Time Apple are to host the ‘Let’s Rock’ event. It’s seems that new iPods are a certainty, but it looks increasingly likely that iPhone users may get something new too.

Firmware update 2.1 would be nice, especially if it put an end to the almost endless application crashing woes that I and many others have been experiencing (more on that later). But what if there was more? Could there be more to the ‘Let’s Rock’ theme than first meets the eye? I’m not usually given to wild speculation, but I’ll have a go this time.

How about Guitar Hero, or Rock Band for iPhone?

Just a thought. Any other guesses?

In the UK at least. Two examples from the last day or so. Firstly my long-time-industry-compatriot Marek Pawlowski was out shopping with his girlfriend, who was after a new phone  – read through his excellent post until you get to the iPhone part, by the way – in the O2 shop there weren’t any iPhones on display because somebody had nicked the (tethered) display models and the staff were afraid to put in any replacements!

Next, I happened to be passing Carphone Warehouse and I couldn’t resist popping into the (customer-free) shop. Four iPhones, all working, tethered to the usual bare bones wooden tea chest (what’s that all about?). I started playing…

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It’s a bit late in the day (a compressed blogosphere day, that is) but here’s my wrap up of the rest of 1.1.3′s enhancements. I’m not going to detail all the changes. As I said this isn’t going to be a copy and paste blog, and the changes are well detailed elsewhere. I want to pick out a few of the things that others may have skipped over, and what they mean for the iPhone in the future.

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I’m going to outline my thoughts on the rest of the enhancements to the 1.1.3 release of the firmware in my next post, but for now I’d like to skip to the feature I was most excited about since the news was leaked – upgraded Google Maps with a pseudo-GPS function.

A New Look

The Maps interface has changed, adding:

• a movable “drop pin” function to mark your own locations
• the hybrid map view, where maps are overlaid on satellite images. Having the Hybrid view makes Maps far better in my opinion – it makes route-finding much easier when you can actually see the buildings and landscape
• your current locations now becomes the start location when you switch to Directions, rather than blanking both start and end location (which was a little bugbear of mine)

But the big news in this Maps upgrade is the Location feature.

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