World Wide Developers Conference 2008 - SDK continued
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One of the other interesting items covered was the Push Notification Service. Instead of having the program continue to run in the background, they have the developers push notifications to the Apple Push Notification Service, which in return pushes the notification to the user.
All of these applications will be available through the Apple App Store. The announced applications at the time of writing have been around $9.99, which isn't bad for an application; it's about $5 less than Windows Mobile Apps. Developers are raving about how easy it is to program with the SDK, so I'm guessing the cheaper price has to do with ease of programming. It is up to the developer how much the price will be, and the developers will get 70 percent of the price. The other 30 percent goes to Apple for hosting it.
MobileMe
I know I said that there wasn't any great news outside of the iPhone, but this is the single piece that piqued my interest. MobileMe is the consumer version of Microsoft's Exchange server. Unless you're a business, you more than likely don't run an exchange server, but now there is a way to get Exchange-like services for consumers. It will sync your email, contacts, favorites and files on a Mac, PC or mobile device. It will cost $99 a year for and individual and $149 for a family plan. It's a bit pricey, but well worth the features.
If your company has an exchange server, then you can skip this. It was created to replace the .mac accounts. Why create a new platform when the same kind of platform already exists, and why not just add it to your .mac system? I don't know, but .me doesn't sound any better to me.
3G iPhone 2.0
There is no surprise here when it comes to the new iPhone. People have known about this for months. It was just a matter of when it goes on sale. It was officially announced at WWDC 2008, killing most of the rumored features and speculation.
One quite obvious point is that this new iPhone runs on the faster 3G network. Apple claims 3G to be twice the speed of the older network. I'm sure that’s under lab testing and that real life situations won't be quite as fast as lab tests.
The other big hardware feature added was a GPS. Previously Google Maps used the cell signal to triangulate your position. This wasn't very accurate and couldn't give you an exact location. Now the iPhone has an A-GPS chip, meaning it can now pinpoint your location. Almost all cell phones now have a GPS chip in them.
Next: More 3G iPhone >>
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