We had the pre-event guessing game, the show itself and now the dissection of yesterday’s Apple iPhone announcements, so did everything pan out as the pundits predicted?
Our man in the know, Mac Format’s Graham Barlow, was spot on with his prediction of motion-sensitive iPhone games, with two titles already launched and plenty more in the pipeline.
VoIP in a cage
He also hit the VoIP bullseye, although not many guessed that it would actually be limited to access only on Wi-Fi hotspots. There was no mention of adding video to the phone’s camera, however, although the widely predicted ‘business’ focus came good, with new support for pushed email.
Of the rest of the roadmap plans, there were a couple of surprises – chief among these was that the iPhone SDK won’t be free to use. Developers wishing to get official with their applications will have to pay $99 (£50) a year to get in Apple’s good books.
No freeloading fun
Speaking of cost, there were hopes that members of the iPhone hacker community would be able to go legit and release whatever they fancied to an audience with un-jailbroken handsets.
Sadly for them, this isn’t likely to happen as the new App Store will be the only route onto unhacked iPhones for third-party applications.
Apple says it will have room for freeware applications, but that they’ll need to be approved just like commercial software. In other words, VoIP applications that work over the phone network and anything else that might upset the suits sure as heck won’t make the cut.
Lastly, if you’re mad keen to catch the full presentation by Steve Jobs and his tech henchmen for yourself, Apple has kindly put a video of it online for the public record – check it out right here.
