Apple catching up

The tile of my previous post, with the predictions for the iPhone 3.0 OS presentation was "Apple raising the bar". After the presentation, I actually have to say Apple is trying to catch up... The features announced were unimpressive and there was no real news.

On my predictions, nothing from MEDIUM to LOW came true (hey, I got it right), while most of the HIGH made it (I am not sure about a couple yet, but I will double-check and report later).

My HIGH probability predictions:

1. Copy & Paste. MADE IT
2. MMS. MADE IT
   
3. Calendar API access from the SDK. NOT SURE YET, but they have said they have 1,000 APIs available. I would be shocked if calendar is not there...
   
4. A Task application. NOT SURE YET. Definitely they did not mention it, so this is the one that might not have made it (or is it too small to talk about it, we'll see)
   
5. Push support. Not the one that actually makes sense (for that you need multithreading support), but the one Steve Jobs announced almost a year ago for last September and never delivered. A crappy push, but at least some push. MADE IT (and the good push did not)

What else? Spotlight (for searching), landscape support for more apps (Mail, about time...), some improvements on the Stock app (news at the bottom), Caldav and .ics support for Calendar (good), Voice memos, API for hardware devices (very interesting, in particular the medical applications), Maps in you app (crucial for geolocation in social networking, it is going to be big), subscription paid models in the App Store (more ways to make money for developers, always a positive), Peer to Peer support via Bluetooth (very cool for sharing contacts or multiplayers games).

Not a bad list, but the rest of the pack is now ahead of Apple (wow). Palm in particular. Apple is behind the competition, they have to catch up. The question is whether Palm can actually deliver. If they do, we have a new ballgame.