Steve has just announced full Exchange/Active Sync on the iPhone, supported by the native mail, cal, and contact apps on the device. This is what we all hoped for, right? The Exchange server tab has on/off toggles for contacts, calendar and email. Pretty promising for enterprise integration. It looks like they’re doing this themselves, no mention of IBM, or Lotus, etc.
Apple is really stepping out here, demonstrating full support for exchange calendars, collaboration, etc.
How’s this for dramatic… they demonstrated a full remote iPhone data wipe… Rumor has it the NSA will work with ATT to remote detonate terrorist owned iPhones.
Apple is claiming that Disney is talking about using the iPhone corporate Activesync support.
The SDK Scoop is also here…
Apple says they’re "releasing the same APIs and Tools that we use to develop iPhone apps"… "we combined Cocoa them with our multitouch knowledge for Cocoa touch, for the iPhone SDK."
No holding back, it looks like… security, power management, file system, certificates. Core services will include SQLite, Networking, Net Services, Core Audio Audio Mixing, Audio recording, Video Playback, Core Locations (used to create location aware services)…. they’re teasing us with mention of capabilities such as multichannel 3d audio and a 3D graphics layer.
They are showing a great looking desktop interface builder, debugger, and iPhone simulator.. a "Software iPhone".
Of course… multi-Touch events and controls are being mentioned as well… programming for these is completely new! They demo’d a gamecalled "Touch Fighter" where you point to shoot and tilt the iPhone to steer, and they showed details of how it was created, debugged, etc….pretty incredible. They also demo’d EA’s iPhone version of "Spore".
For a more "serious" demo, they showed a SalesForce.com native app demo. Looks nice, but I wonder if this kind of application really benefits from being native, instead of a web app. AOL AIM also made an appearance… honestly, I was hoping to see demos of native apps from companies that aren’t household names.
iTunes App Store!… It’s here, available on the next firmware update, and will include the top 50 apps and search.
Once this presentation is available on the Apple site, it’s going to be very popular. All of this is coming in the iPhone 2.0 update. It’ll have the SDK and enterprise capabilities. There’s a Beta release going out today.Thousands of developers will have it today, and the SDK kit will be a free download. Apple needs the feedback. Customers will see this in June as a free software update.
Sounds incredible, right? There are many more details to come in coming days… but what about certification/implementation/distribution forless than large development firms?… This is the biggest issue for developers who’ve been waiting for this news for some time. The real details on this are to come. For now, Steve just said "The developers are going to register with us if they want to distribute them. If they write a bad app, we can both track them down and we can turn off the app’s distribution. So we’re putting controls in place."
Incredibly… Steve also said that SIM unlocking WILL be allowed (he waited to be asked about this before he answered).
Well, then there’s "iFund"… a 100 Million dollars venture capital fund for iPhone developers. Whatever this is, it’s huge news, so we hope. More on this, and more on this, and…
Still some questions, but Steve did not disappoint!
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