Apple has tonight given us a sneak preview of what is coming in the iPhone 3.0 major update which DaniWeb writer Davey Winder was second guessing earlier. While Davey managed to predict the arrival of cut, copy and paste functionality for iPhone 3.0, this was pretty much a given to be honest. He also got it bang on when he said the event would "pretty much all be iPhone business" and there would be none of the mythical Apple Tablet announcements some had speculated about.
So what exactly did Apple announce in what turned out to be less launch event and more of a live press release of a forthcoming release, for want of a better description?
The answer is quite a lot really, more than 1000 developer APIs and 100 additional bits of iPhone functionality for end users. Amongst them, something that Digg supremo got wring when he predicted there would be no MMS support for the new iPhone OS. Yes, Apple is adding MMS capability so you will soon be able to send images, and audio for that matter, via the iPhone messaging application. Yay.
Search gets a big nod, with the arrival of Spotlight which brings a 'search all your iPhone' mentality to the fore by allowing users to search all the core applications such as Mail, as well as searching your installed apps and your iPod library for good measure. While Spotlight is a welcome new arrival, at the launch it appears that the demo of Mail being searched did not make it clear if message bodies could be searched or not. Hopefully Apple, or the blogosphere, will clarify this real soon now.
I also like the addition of a voice recording app, Voice Memo, which brings this functionality into the built-in apps rather than relying upon 3rd party ones, which is nice especially as it appears the resulting memos can be sent making use of that new MMS functionality.
But this event was really more about the developers, all 50,000 of them who have registered with the paid for Apple iPhone development program. There are more than 1000 new APIs in the new iPhone 3.0 SDK, including new models for payment which allow for in-game and in-app subscriptions for additional content. A P2P Bluetooth API allows for automatic discovery of other iPhone users running the same app or playing the same game in the local area, and a new mapping API brings turn-by-turn directions into 3rd party mapping apps at long, long last.
Talking of 'at long last' items, as well as that cut, copy and paste function there will also be push notification functionality which is long overdue in my opinion.
The developer version beta of iPhone 3.0 is available immediately to registered developers, and the public release is slated for 'this summer' according to sources at Apple.
