The Null Device

WWDC 2008 keynote

So that was the long-awaited Apple WWDC 2008 keynote. The big announcement was probably the worst-kept secret in Cupertino, the 3G iPhone. There's also the iPhone 2.0 OS (available to non-3G iPhone users), and a web-based service named me.com, which is basically mac.com with Google-style AJAX apps, iPhone integration and a mac.com-sized pricetag; so if you're an Apple true believer, you know where to send your $99 a year. I wonder how well non-Apple alternatives will work with iPhones.

Other than that, Apple are making minor concessions on the issues of the iPhone being too locked down. Enterprises will be able to deploy their own (non-Apple-approved) apps to up to 100 pre-registered, cryptographically certified iPhones, and while Apple won't let you run software in the background on your iPhone, they will be providing a (proprietary, Apple-controlled) conduit for push notifications, which IM applications will be able to use.

Anyway, Your Humble Narrator isn't lining up outside the AppleStore to get one, even at the reduced price ($199 worldwide; no word on minimum contract prices, i.e., the rest of the iceberg), given that Google's Android looks to promise almost everything the iPhone has, only without the proprietary lock-in.

There are 3 comments on "WWDC 2008 keynote":

Posted by: Michael S. http://beebo.org/ Mon Jun 9 20:28:33 2008

Apple are making the cloud more and more useful, and more and more difficult to avoid... I'm really glad Android exists (to push Apple), and I might get one. I'm not really confident anyone can nail the hardware as well as Apple does though. Apple's computers are (mostly) better than the competition, but their smaller devices are a whole heap better than anything else out there.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org/acb/ Mon Jun 9 22:07:41 2008

Well, Android won't have multitouch (Apple have that patented). And I think that Apple's tendency to increasingly lock down and control their non-Mac devices could be their downfall. Though for now, it seems that people will pay a premium and submit to all sorts of constraints just because it's Apple.

Posted by: Peter http://www.frogworth.com/blog Tue Jun 10 00:57:56 2008

Some of this stuff looks pretty cool: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080530-android-struts-its-stuff-with-new-features-more-integration.html

Multitouch is... nice, but hardly a killer app it seems to me. Ange has a Touch, and it's got the standard Apple thing going for me - ooh pretty, but so many *ridiculous* constraints, both in terms of lock-down and in terms of the ways you're forced to interact. Lack IMAP-IDLE (if that's still the case) and copy-and-paste may keep me away from the new iPhone when I get back to Oz. We'll see!