Where there any big surprises at today's Apple iPhone SDK press conference? Well, it started on time... Steve Jobs was at the podium at 10:00 a.m. sharp. Oh, and they're building out the iPhone for enterprise use. And opening up 3rd party development for iPhone applications. Happy Day!
Starting today, Apple's opened the same native APIs and tools they use to build iPhone applications. We're sure you'll all miss jailbreaking your iPhone every other month to keep up with the firmware updates, but as demoed by Scott Forestall, VP of iPhone Software, it's going to be ridiculously easy to build, debug, and push native 3rd party applications.
For examples, they trotted out reps from EA (demoing a two-week build of the highly anticipated game Spore, from Sims creator Wil Wright), Salesforce, AOL (AIM is coming to the iPhone), and Sega, showing off Super Money Ball... a game played entirely by tilting the iPhone. All third-party apps can be submitted to sell of the all-new App Store. Expect that icon to appear on your iPhone with the next update. It's a straight 70/30 split between the app's developers and Apple. No hosting fees. So a lot of developers to jump on this big-time.
As for the enterprise build-out, they started by licensing Microsoft's ActiveSync, and MS is tailoring the architecture to the iPhone so it works directly with the Exchange server without adding new applications that you wouldn't want anyway... like Microsoft usually does. It's all done from the iPhone's old email, calendar, and contact apps, as God intended. That direct link makes updating and adding meetings and new employees happen very, very fast, and when you're "let go," your friendly IT department can remote-wipe your iPhone before you get your two checks.
It gets especially fun when you start putting enterprise functions together with Salesforce applications. And Steve's One More Thing: it all goes live for the iTouch, too (though there will be a mild upgrade charge for those). Otherwise, iPhone Firmware 2.0 should be live by June.
And least we forget, if you want to keep your iPhone safe from all the dangers in the world, there's only two options: Apple Care and a SquareTrade iPhone warranty... and ours costs lest, lasts longer, has optional Accidental Damage coverage, and has the best reviewed service in the world. Your call, really.
Liked that? DIGG this post and Subscribe to our feed!
