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Apple announces new OS and 3G iPhone at WWDC

by on10 June 2008

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Delivery of them will slip into July timeframe


As you
could see yesterday, Apple introduced its new 3G iPhone and you can read about it here.

Apple has sold six million iPhones worldwide since the launch of the iPhone. Apple has now squarely targeted Enterprise customers as one of the big areas that they see for growth with the iPhone. Apple is devoting a lot of resources to making the iPhone easy to manage for corporate customers and giving IT shops the ability to both develop applications for the iPhone, but at the same time manage the iPhone. Of course, it does not hurt that they plan to offer Exchange and VPN support in the next iPhone release.

AT&T, who will continue here in the U.S. as the exclusive iPhone provider, announced some changes to the way that iPhones are sold. All iPhones will now require a two-year contract and will no longer be sold as just the iPhone itself. This will be true for both AT&T stores as well as Apple stores. No longer will you be able to buy an iPhone online, either. These policies are to reduce “unlocking” of iPhone 2. In addition, iPhone data plans will now cost users $10 more per month on the basis that iPhone customers on average are using more data than typical AT&T customers that have a data plan. AT&T and Apple will no longer have a revenue sharing agreement as they did with the first generation iPhone. No word yet on if current iPhone customers will be seeing a $10 increase in their bill.

As we suspected, the new iPhone 2.0 firmware will be available to iPhone users in what is being predicted as early July. Those who are existing iPhone owners will get the firmware for free, which is a bit of a surprise. As for iPod Touch users, they will also get the 2.0 firmware, but they will be charged $9.95 for the privilege of upgrading to it. The 2.0 firmware will include contact searching, complete iWork document support, complete Office document support, bulk delete/move for mail, ability to save images that you receive, scientific calculator now in landscape mode, advanced parental controls and improve/additional language support.

The Jobs squad also showed a variety of new applications and ways that developers are building things for the iPhone. The applications that they showed were impressive and look to be ushering in a new era in mobile phone application development because of the rich feature set that is available on the iPhone.

Beyond this, about the only other news of note was the announcement of Mac OS X 10.6, or codename “Snow Leopard,” if you like. The focus will be on enhancement and tweaks to the OS to improve performance. In addition, Snow Leopard will include out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange.

The Exchange support will be offered in Mail, Address Box, and iCal. This will be done using Microsoft’s Exchange Web services protocol and because of the way that it is supported you will be able to access your Email, contacts, and calendar on your Mac or iPhone.

Snow Leopard will also feature enhanced 64-bit and multi-core processor support to increase the amount of addressable memory and at the same time improve performance. Snow Leopard will also be adding what Apple is calling OpenCL, which is technology that will allow for the use of GPU power. However, no mention yet about Nvidia CUDA support or if this will be part of OpenCL.

It is expected that Apple will have at least a few more minor announcements tomorrow, but don’t expect anything too earth shattering. It is obvious that the focus is really on iPhone and iPhone development this time around, with a dash of Snow Leopard thrown in for good measure.

Last modified on 10 June 2008
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