iPhone 3.0 - The Brightside
A lot of the coverage coming out of today’s WWDC keynote from Apple has focused on the ridiculous prices that existing iPhone owners will have to pay in order to upgrade to the newer, spiffier iPhone 3G S. But, rather than waste more pixels on that angle of the story, I thought I’d spend a moment saying how thrilled I am about iPhone OS 3.0, the features of which will be available to all iPhone owners, free-of-charge (and to iPod Touch owners for $9.95).
First, cut & paste is awesome. Second, parental controls on iPhone apps will hopefully mean less stupid app store rejections (like the rejection dealt to NIN earlier this year). Third, in-app purchases are going to make apps like the Amazon Kindle app that much more useful. And fourth, the ability to play music from your iTunes library via an external app is going to hopefully make Last.fm scrobbling a reality.
Look, I’m not happy that upgrading to an iPhone 3G S is going to be so pricy. And I’m not happy that I’ll have to jailbreak my 3G to get the video recording features that the 3G S will get standard. But I am happy for what I’ve got: a tiny little computer that fits in my pocket and does tons of nifty shit that I couldn’t do otherwise. And that’s what I’m going to focus on. How about you?
Comments On This Article
Jason says:
Although I’m ecstatic about 3.0, I don’t think the parental controls will limit the stupid app rejections. Those parental control are simply there to control what is currently on the iPhone. While it might mean that Apple will open up the approval process a bit, I don’t think it’s a certainty. The problem with the app approval process currently isn’t lack of parental controls; it’s a complete lack of consistent evaluation rubric. Until Apple fixes that, we will continue to see ridiculous app rejections, with or without parental controls.
E. Christopher Clark says:
Well, I suppose I could have phrased this better, but where I think parental controls and ratings will help is that a NIN app that links through to the Explicit album THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL will not be rejected for featuring explicit content. Instead, it can now be categorized as Explicit or Mature or whatever and Apple will be satisfied.
I agree that they need to work on their evaluation rubric, but I do hope that ratings will help with that somewhat.
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