iPhone OS 3.0 has clearly got a lot of people excited, especially with all the talk about cut and paste, MMS, and even maybe tethering. Here’s what Apple went public with today – we’ll be updating it as more gets announced. It’s interesting to note that Apple explained away background processes as gobbling up too much battery life… And yet just about every other platform out there manages to pull it off just fine. There were plenty of app demos, some impressive, some not so much: the Sims on iPhone made an appearance thanks to EA, and a glucose-checking app from Johnson & Johnson called LifeScan looks outstanding. A beta for developers is available today, and it’s spreading internationally – 15 more countries are on the App Store list, which will total eventually reach a count of 77. Public availability will be in June for iPhone 3G owners, but those with an iPod Touch will have to shell out $10. Standard. Anyone with original iPhones may have some issues, since things like Stereo Bluetooth and MMS weren’t supported by the hardware.
Overall, it felt like the announcement was a lot of catch-up – even the new universal Spotlight search, probably the biggest surprise, isn’t something we haven’t seen before on Android or the Palm Pre. Regardless, Apple has plugged a lot of holes today, and the new APIs should open a plenty of doors for developers.
- In-App purchaces for subscriptions, new levels of content
- Peer-to-peer connectivity via Bluetooth
- Accessory apps
- APIs for apps to use Maps, enabling turn-by-turn directions
- Push notifications
- Streaming audio and video APIs
- Cut and paste OMG
- Sending multiple images simultaneously
- Landscape keyboard in mail and elsewhere
- MMS support
- Voice memos
- Stocks including story ticker
- Search in key apps, like contacts
- Spotlight on homescreen searches everything on your iPhone, lives on its own page at far left
- Stereo Bluetooth
- Tethering built in on client side (still working with carriers)
Plenty more after the jump!
- Encrypted profiles
- YouTube accounts
- YouTube subscriptions
- YouTube ratings
- EAS policies
- Revoke certs
- Languages
- VPN on demand
- OTA profiles
- Media scrubber
- Parental controls
- Call log
- Auto-fill
- iTunes login
- iTunes account creation
- Create meeting invites
- Anti-phishing filters
- EAP SIM
- LDAP
- Wi-Fi auto-login
- Proxy support
- Shake to shuffle
- Live streaming
- Audio/video tags
- 1,000 new developer APIs
- UI view
- UI alert view
- UI scroll view
- UI table view
- UI action sheet
- In-game Voice
- Battery API
- Nav Bars
- Core data
- Highlighted images
- Cell styles
- Data detectors
- Text selection
- Localized collation
- In app e-mail
- Audio recorder
- View controller
- Proximity sensor
- Open URL
- iPod Library access
- GPS Lingo
- Streaming audio
- Toolbars
- Shake API
- iAP