New Apple iPhone Unveiled
Finally the new model of Apples iPhone has been unveiled. Apples CEO Steve Jobs revealed the new device and its feature at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco yesterday.
As expected, the new iPhone will run on 3G networks which offer higher data transfer speeds than its predecessor’s EDGE network. The new phone – released on June 11th - is to be sold for £99 ($199US) which is a much lower price than when the original model was released at £299 ($599US) just under a year ago.
The new iPhone also features global positioning system (GPS) technology, allowing users to pinpoint their exact location anywhere in the world with the map-based software service.
Mobile Me, made its debut at the conference as well. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, described the service as “[Microsoft] Exchange for the rest of us.”
Users can now – for a cost of £50 ($99US) a year - instantly synchronise e-mail, contacts and calendars across multiple devices, all of which will communicate with a central cloud.
The bulk of the Jobs’ keynote focused on the iPhone software and what it means for developers.
Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iPhone software, outlined the utilities available to developers, including Cocoa Touch, a user interface object-oriented framework. “This makes building applications for our full screen touch interface an absolute breeze,” he said.
When Apple unveiled the SDK months ago, it made a point of shining the spotlight on a few high-profile technology companies that had created new iPhone apps after privately testing the toolkit for a short time.
Apple checked back on the progress some of those companies had made, with a few other developers who had come up with unique applications taking the stage.
Sega showed its progress on “Super Monkey Ball.” It was one of several game makers Apple gave stage time too, hinting that games may come to be one of the App Store’s most important categories.
For users to obtain iPhone software, they’ll have to use the Apple App Store, which can be accessed via a computer or on the iPhone directly. Applications smaller than 10 megabytes can be accessed via the iPhone’s cellular connection; anything larger must be downloaded via a WiFi connection or through a computer.
Jobs announced some alternate ways for developers to distribute applications. An enterprise that doesn’t want to make an application available to the general public can create software that only runs on iPhones that it has authorized, for example. It can distribute the app over its own in-house intranet.
Ad hoc is a third method of application distribution, under which the developer certification program can be expanded to 100 iPhones. It enables sharing in a teacher/university setting, for example.
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