An Apple a Day

I watched the liveblogging of the Apple media event today for the iPhone SDK. It was a better event than I anticipated.

I didn't expect Apple to deliver on nearly as many enterprise wishlist items as it did. I'd say Apple scored a home run on delivery of full ActiveSync and Microsoft Exchange functionality.

The iPhone will have push email, calendar and contacts; remote calendar and address book editing; global address list; certificates and identities, WPA2/802.1x; enforced security protocols; additional VPN protocols; device configuration; and remote wipe.

It should boost the sales of iPhones in July after the enterprise features are released in late June. The anticipated release of the 3G iPhone in June should also produce a significant bump in sales.

The other announcement from Apple was equally anticipated. Apple will release its SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iPhone in late June. The beta is being released today to developers.

The applications created will be marketed on a new store within iTunes and from the iPhone directly. Apple is keeping tight control of what apps can be installed on the iPhone, so it is not allowing free distribution and installation of iPhone applications.

Of most importance to my nephew, who already covets my iPhone, was the demonstration apps on the iPhone. Apple demoed a few of its own applications.

My favorite was the graphic program that lets one distort a photo and then shake the iPhone like an Etch-a-Sketch to return the picture to normal. Apple also created a space fight game that demonstrated the use of the iPhone's accelerometer to steer the ship in space.

AOL Instant Messenger comes to the iPhone in an excellent looking application. If only there were an easy way to use iChat without the use of mirrors to gain use of the camera on the back of the iPhone.

I'm not really a gamer because gamepads defy my level of eye-hand coordination. I don't even play many computer games unless you have to memorize very few keyboard commands. But Electronic Arts and SEGA might change that with their iPhone games.

SEGA showed how using the accelerometer completely changes playing games in a natural and easy way with its demo of "Super Monkey Ball". SEGA even commented that they had to fly in a graphic artist to scale up the video quality of the game as the iPhone had better video than they anticipated. SEGA's game was a console quality game, not a cell phone game.

Electronic Arts demoed "Spore", which looked like a lot of time-wasting fun for a commute ride home. I thought that EA's video quality was better than SEGA's even after SEGA sent in an artist to help upscale its images.

Business applications for the salesforce and for the medical community were intermingled with the flash-ier games (inside joke if you read yesterday's comments by Steve Jobs on Adobe's Flash). It was pretty clear that the bloggers weren't as interested in these applications as the enterprise user surely is. However, I found these interesting when I watched the event this evening.

Salesforce.com demonstrated its applications it had built in two weeks with one engineer. The level of detail and integration possible on the iPhone was impressive when compared to Windows Mobile applications or Palm applications one is used to seeing on smartphones.

Epocrates demonstrated its medical database of pharmaceuticals. It was impressing to watch how they were able to create new ways for doctors to find drug names based on shape and color on a smartphone platform. The VP, Chuck Dietrich mentioned that they were able to include higher resolution pictures of the pills due to the iPhone's graphics capabilities.

The only miss today was that neither of the new features - enterprise functions nor the SDK - will be delivered until June. Rumors already had the SDK pegged for June release so that was not a huge surprise. But the enterprise functions should have been delivered sooner.

An earlier release of the enterprise functions could have increased sales of the iPhone for the second quarter and carried the anticipation for the SDK and iPhone apps through until the SDK delivery in June.

It feels like Apple squandered an opportunity when its stock is in the doldrums. From the look of Apple's stock price today, Wall Street agrees. There was a drop in price from yesterday instead of the usual stock bump after a Job's event.