The phone that promises to change the world of comms for ever...

Last Monday, June 11th, between 7:00pm and 8:30pm, CET, I was glued to my Mac Book and linked to an Engadget URL that continuously refreshed live blogs posted by Engadget reporters in the Grande Salle during Steve Jobs WWDC 2007 keynote pitch. Steve's keynote that lasted for about 90 minutes was actually all but the last few seconds about the new OSX version to be released next October, a.k.a. Leopard (Apple uses wild cats as OS names whereas MSFT uses mountain and bar names - Longhorn?).

The ten new OSX features that Steve demo'ed in his keynote out of a total of 300 to be eventually delivered, were fun to watch and it has been proven time and again that Apple designers are from another planet. The currently available OSX version is miles ahead of the competition. Leopard will apparently set the bar even higher. That's good for Mac users... however, I believe, Microsoft will have to continue at a lower pace than Apple in terms of OS revisions and eventually admit that it's useless to keep going after Mac designers for ever. Microsoft OS'es are fairly open and support a myriad of PC related hardware from a gazillion suppliers; major MSFT OS revisions need driver re-coding for literally millions of available devices out there (1,5M for Vista I think I heard). If I were them, I'd just fix security and stability in my OS'es and plan them for lifecycles of at least 12 to 15 years... then watch the Apple wizards invent the "future" (far too soon for masses to adopt, sorry to say) and learn from their mistakes.

Anyway, Microsoft also works on a number of innovative initiatives around future user interfaces with multi-touch screens (as we saw them demonstrated in a number of video clips on the net and in the yet to be delivered iPhone) and also user interfaces with images projected on tables, walls, windows, etc where users use their hands in "Minority Report" fashion to interact with computers. Cool stuff...

At the last 3 minutes of his keynote pitch, His Jobness spoke about the iPhone. "One last thing", Steve said... Every developer in the audience felt it was the moment that he'd announce the long awaited iPhone SDK. The SDK is a toolkit that developers use to build apps for the iPhone. The news about the SDK "leaked" in the press in the last week (or somethin') before the WWDC event. So everyone knew that Steve will touch upon the subject one way or another. Of course, the iPhone goes on sale June 29th, 6pm at all US Apple and AT&T stores. Only three weeks left and no developer ever believed that in that short time span any potential third party application for the iPhone would have a snowball's chance in hell to be ready for shipment. How could it? No SDK released to the masses yet! Bloody Apple demons!

Well, his Jobness surprised the troops again and made their day. No need for SDK, he said..."if any application has been written according to the latest Web 2.0 standards and Ajax", he pointed, "then it could run perfectly on the iPhone". What does the trick is the fact that Apple loaded the entire full fledged Safari engine (Apple's browser) on the iPhone. Safari will act as a "container" for the iPhone applets of any of those third party developers. Wunderbar! He added a bounty by saying that any third party code would be offered to use all standard services already embedded in the iPhone. In other words, all you need is a great idea for the mobile gadget... turning the idea into code promises to be dead easy even for your aunt...

Read further an article by an interesting figure, Om Malik, based in California, a regular guest in Johh C. Dvorak's videocast Cranky Geeks. Om predicts that this simple event announced in the last few seconds of Jobs' pitch will change the world of mobile communications devices for ever. Go read his article...