iPhone SDK

So the iPhone roadmap looks very promising. The enterprise functionality is really impressive and places the iPhone extremely well as a mobile device for corporations. The SDK has a lot of power and seems to have access to pretty much everything you’d need (there’s already an SDK for access to the dock connector). Even things like instant messaging and VOIP will be allowed, though obviously the carriers don’t want to deal with all the traffic from VOIP so it’s just wireless but that seems quite reasonable to me. I’m not sure I’d want to try VOIP over an edge network anyway…

The biggest problem I see with the SDK is the $99 entry fee. $99 is nothing to anyone with a decent idea for an iPhone app and the skills to develop it. Heck, if you don’t have $99 to spare how the heck did you manage to afford an iPhone?? Still, once you plonk down that money you’re very unlikely to release your application for free which means just about all the iPhone software is going to be payware. I like the concept of selling software and thus paying developers, I earn my living that way, but it’s just so nice to have a bunch of freeware or opensource that you can just grab and try out and maybe it’ll be great maybe not. Little ideas released for free make an awful lot of sense and make the world a better place (in a very techno-geek way). That’s unlikely to happen with the iPhone.

That said, how hard would it be to set up a donation pot to buy access to the iPhone SDK for open source projects? Not sure how it would all work but it would be a great idea and if you don’t donate enough the software really does go away so there’s more than just altruistic incentive.

Bottom line for me, I can’t wait to get the exchange functionality because I’ve been wondering what the best way to get my exchange calendar synced with my iPhone (I use exchange for work and iCal for home but iPhone for both) and I’m really keen to get an instant messaging client on the iPhone as well. I can live with AIM if that’s all I get though most of the people I know are on MSN. Beyond that it’s just a bonus so I’m really quite happy with what’s come out.