WWDC: iPhones, MobileMe and a Big Cat in a Cold Country

Wow, that OS X iPhone SDK stuff sure was one helluva Dog and Pony show. Nothing much new there except those cool little notifications apps can send you. That sounds cool my friends. Very cool.

Oh, and I want the AP app. It's free and will enable me to do skunk works reporting, which you can no doubt guess I would love to do.

From that, you have no doubt inferred I intend on using a device running Apple's OS X iPhone 2.0. And you'd be correct. Which neatly leads us to the big news from Steve's Keynote yesterday: iPhone 3G.

Well, it's damned pretty. The new plastic back looks nothing like those ugly mockups, it's a thing of beauty.


It's got 3G (As implied) for high-speed data access over-the-air, GPS for precise positional data, allowing breakthrough location-based apps like Loopt to give us a truly awesome experience. The battery offers 10 (Up from 8) hours of 2G talk and 5 hours of 3G talk, beating competing 3G devices by some 1.5-2 hours.

Aside from that, it's the same great phone it's always been. Same gorgeous front with the awesome 3.5" Multi-Touch display, same Home button and (upgraded) iPhone OS software.

And O2 have made my (And WizzKid's) day. The iPhone 3G will be available Pay/Go here in the UK. This means there is no reason I can't get one. As such, assuming O2 are nice and allow the Pay/Go-ers to buy on launch day (Oh yeah, July 11) along with the contract signers and the price for the 16GB is less than or equal to £329, I will be at my local Carphone Warehouse store (Just 10 minutes away) on launch day to pick mine up.

As for contract signers, O2 has dramatically improved the deal for you:


Very good deals there, I think you'll agree. The £30 tariff is weird. Yes, it's good the monthly cost now has a new bottom end, but the difference between the £30 and the £35 is so great the extra £5 is more than justified. Still, good if you're on a budget and mostly just want data.


Now, onto the next big thing from Steve's talk. MobileMe. Yes, the rumours were true. And MobileMe does indeed look like a huge improvement, Exchange for the rest of us. With MobileMe, I'll be able to keep my desktop (The Mac mini I mean. I can of course do it on a PC too, but I'm transitioning to an Apple oriented environment) and my phone (iPhone 3G 16GB in Special White Version) in constant sync, all over the air.


That's e-mail, contacts, calendar, photos, bookmarks, the whole deal. Nice.

Furthermore, it will enable me to share my photos from iPhoto and to some extent my videos from iMovie. And all of this...With my jensonb(at)mac(dot)com e-mail address.

I knew it was a good idea to get in on that early. Best part is, my .Mac trial will be automagically upgraded to a MobileMe trial in early July, so I'll run out the trial period in MobileMe. Then, I'll be buying the 1 year 20GB (Yes, they doubled the storage) for the new prie of £59 - down £10. Awesome.

And you know. It was kind of important I move to an all-new e-mail account anyway. My Hotmail was set up for me some time ago. Probably over a decade and I've used it ever since. And I've never used folders. It's a mess. Windows Live Mail (The desktop app) allows me to easily search all the e-mails, but seriously...Change was needed.

So now I'm in my ultra-tidy new @mac.com e-mail account and I love it. Much better UI as well.

I recommend all my friends reading this now begin to use my @mac.com address for all personal communication with me.

And finally, Steve has revealed there is indeed a 10.6 being previewed, it's called Snow Leopard. I for one like that name, it's befitting of this release which is said to focus on giving OS X a smaller footprint and optimisig it, for example making it work better with multiple cores.

All very exciting stuff.

Jens Out