iPhone SDK - opening the floodgates ?
Mar 8th, 2008 by sharps
I’m still an aspiring iPhone owner - having only bought a second replacement Treo in the last year - I’m not quite ready to shell out more cash right now; and I’m also waiting for TomTom (or a competitor) to port their GPS app. to the iPhone. That’s something I use a lot and I’m not carrying 2 gadgets around. With the launch of the iPhone SDK I guess the chances of my favorite apps. becoming available on the iPhone just increased.
The news that Apple won’t prevent anyone developing a VOIP app. is pretty good - that might even get me back to using Skype again (or whoever beats them to it).
I really hope the developers go nuts with the iPhone - we’ve been on the cusp of the next generation of location aware, nomadic, personal applications for at least the last decade - hopefuly Apple’s brand and current halo will be enough to finally get us there. The Kleiner-Perkins iPhone fund should help and the App Store could be interesting.
FWIW - Gizmodo has a decent roundup of what was actually announced last week.
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I have the Tom Tom GPS software on my Treo, and am going to sell it - replaced it with a small GPS device. The problem I have is that I still had to carry 2 devices, the phone and the little GPS box, plus I had to carry the bulky power cable. I found if the GPS box went flat then you had no GPS service for a period until the box charged. I found out, of course, in the rental car at the airport! I got most of the way to the hotel using Google Maps on the Treo before the box got enough charge to get a signal. The other thing that I don’t like is that if you get a call while navigating the directions stop for the duration of the call. So if someone called at the wrong time I would invariably end up missing some turn. I like converged devices - so would like to see how the iPhone’s location/mapping works out in practice. I’d also like to see if it’s webbrowser and soon to come (I hope) ssh client work well enough that they would offset the fact that you ca’t use the iPhone as a modem, as you can with the Treo.
Cheers, Liam
I’ve never really found a need to use my cell-phone as a modem; a combination of email on my Treo and broadly available WiFi means I’m rarely without someway to connect to the inturweb or collect email when I’m traveling.
I like the idea of Apple (or someone) - bringing location-awareness to Google Maps (eg. via bluetooth GPS) - as much as I like TomTom - I do find their maps / directions a bit out of date compared to Google.
[...] the appearance of a decent application market for the iPhone. Apple just announced that they are encouraging a developer ecosystem - so the apps. will no doubt start appearing this summer. Also, if you can’t wait - you can a [...]