Life is a State of Mind

As expected, Apple had their iPhone SDK event today where they announced version 3.0 for iPhone and iPod touches is coming this Summer (developers can get the beta SDK today). It will cost $9.95 for iPod touch owners, and it’s free for iPhone owners (probably subsidized by the subscription revenue from your phone plan).

It great news is that the new iPhone OS will finally have several features it should already have:

• finally support cut and paste both within an application and between applications
• finally support synchronizing notes between the iPhone and a Mac desktop via iTunes (probably PC too)
• finally support search, globally through the core applications (Mail/Notes/iPod/Calendar) using spotlight

There are also some pleasant surprises:

• CalDAV support for any CalDAV server, not just MobileMe; could be useful for some SOHO operations with shared calendars
• stereo bluetooth; very useful for ballroom dancers, one partner wears iPod/iPhone and wired headset, 2nd partner wears bluetooth headset and both can dance to music and ignore the other music sharing the studio floor
• landscape keyboard now available in all main applications, was already in Safari, it will be nice having it in email, notes, etc; this is a big deal for those of us with big fat fingers
• support for MMS messages, I think this lets you “text” a photo directly to someone’s phone (that also supports MMS), or a voicemail, or a sound file

Update: Wow – how could I have missed the addition of peer to peer connectivity via Bluetooth!? Potential for security lapse here, but also potential for lots of new applications. Very interesting.

I am sad that there is no apparent change on the “please allow my Apple bluetooth keyboard to work with my Apple iPhone” front; not sure why this would continue to be blocked.

I am unsurprised there is still no Flash and no tethering; for Flash is a security nightmare, and I am glad we don’t allow flash on the iPhone; and tethering is a problem with the carriers (AT&T and others) who want to collect more money for tethering because they are greedy bastards and don’t understand that data is data regardless of wether it lives on your phone or your TV or your tethered laptop.

In other news, Cisco (the networking company) is getting into the server blade and server blade chassis business with their new device. I am very glad there will be more competition in this space as Sun, HP, and IBM have been a little stuck in the mud lately. A healthy competitor could shake things up a little and encourage them to think more efficiently. InfoWeek story on the Cisco announcement has the details, but it looks like you can do up to 4 full length or 8 half length blades in a chassis.

The really big news to me is that an Australian company is making ultra low power server blades using Atom 330 servers (at less than 30 watts each blade)! Check out the DreamMicro Atom Fanless Blade x10 NetServer if your company is interested in super low power server gear. Throw Xen and your favorite 64 bit Linux distro on these blades and you’ll have some pretty sweet servers!