  Is
the Apple iPhone the most desirable phone ever made? There are better
smartphones out there, even touch-based ones, but is there a better
looking one? Trust Apple to come out with gadgets that ooze desirability
plus functionality out of every shining curve. With the iPhone, Apple is
doing to mobile technology what the iPod did to music. With sales of 17
million and rising, no one can blame Apple for cashing in on the coolest
phone ever.
So it’s time for another update to the iPhone and by extension, its
phone-less cousin the iPod Touch. (Don’t forget that the iPhone is an
iPod as well. Wasn’t it Steve Jobs who said that the iPhone is the best
iPod ever?).
Come July, Apple will most probably be shipping iPhones equipped with
the Version 3.0 Operating System. Don’t worry if you buy an iPhone today
- it is a firmware update that will cost you nothing from the Apple
website, though iPod Touch users will have to pay. In all, there will be
more than 100 updates, not necessarily counting third party apps based
on new software.
After all, the iPhone floodgates really opened after Apple invited
outside developers to the party.
“This is a major update,” says Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice
president of iPhone software. “I can’t wait until you get your hands on
it.” We can’t either, though the iPhone is a little expensive here in
Sri Lanka.
With the iPhone 3.0, Apple is rectifying some basic misses in the
second generation phone, including cut and paste and Multimedia
Messaging Service (MMS). With iPhone 3.0 in place, users will be able to
cut or copy text from one application on the device, then paste it into
another.
 To
select a block of text, for example, the user will double-tab, then
slide a finger across the desired text; a bubble announcing Cut, Copy
and Paste options will appear above the selected text. To paste, the
user double-taps at the insertion point and selects Paste.
 There
will also be a device-wide search, dubbed Spotlight, to match the search
tool integrated with Mac OS X. Spotlight searches through all the major
Apple applications on the device, including Mail, Calendar, Notes and
iPod. The new search option can be used to, for instance, search through
Mail’s in-box, which it cannot do at present.
You know both the iPhone and the iPod Touch can literally be ‘turned
on’ to give widescreen pictures. Now the same landscape mode will be
available for Mail, Text and Notes. You will be able to record and send
audio with a new Voice Memo application; Notes synchronization, support
for CalDAV, a shared-calendar standard used by Google and Yahoo’s online
calendars and support for stereo Bluetooth A2DP are also included. There
will also be a capability for an ad hoc peer-to-peer network between
nearby iPhones and iPod Touches over Bluetooth. That feature can be used
for multiplayer gaming or sharing contacts.
Apple’s App Store can hit your wallet pretty hard and here’s another
way it will take a beating: A new addition to the App Store will let
developers charge users for subscriptions to content, for new content or
for more after-purchase functionality. For example, a newspaper will be
able to charge for subscription from within its own App. A game app will
be able to charge a user for a more difficult level.
There will still be some things the iPhone (and iPod Touch) can’t do.
It won’t capture video, multi-tasking is ruled out because of battery
concerns and Adobe Flash is still a no-no. But then, none of these will
stop the iPhone’s march. |
