One of the most hyped events in tech-culture has come and gone: the Apple WWDC Keynote. So what’s the latest news about the newest iPods, iPhones and Apple computers?
As expected, Apple spent a lot of time talking about how great they are, how many iPhones they’ve sold, the works. They of course didn’t touch too much on many of the problems that developers have been facing, with some applications being arbitrarily denied from the Apple store, but again, no surprise there. They did come out with a new version of the iPhone OS, and it looks like they’ve put a bunch of new features into that. Some of them, like multimedia messaging (MMS), are long overdue, but other features, such as copy-paste, search, and undo, bring the iPhone "experience" one step closer to a real computer.
A neat feature, something people have been doing for ages but it’s good to see it officially supported, is something called "tethering", where you can use your phone’s 3G internet connection to get internet on your laptop, mac or PC, when you hook them together or connect with Bluetooth. AT&T, being the wonderful company it is, isn’t ready to support some of these features quite yet. Quite disappointing, seeing as plenty of other carriers around the world are.
If you’re one of Apple’s "MobileMe" customers, you can use their "Find My iPhone" service, which might be handy after a night of partying. In case your phone gets stolen, you can even delete all of your data remotely, and restore it when you hook it back up to your computer. Not too shabby, but the MobileMe cost might not be worth it for just that.
Apple spent a lot of time showboating applications for their store, some of which looked pretty cool. The one that caught my attention the most was their book offerings – they’re partnering with textbook publishers too, so maybe you can save some money next semester if you’ve got an iPhone.
See the next post for info about the Macbook Pros!
All in all, it was an interesting Apple keynote. Lots of talk about the iPhone, but I think that the laptop price cuts were the most significant thing. We might get in another update later, focusing more on the iPhone.
