Tommystorm

Despite some the very hilarious truths outlined in the “Happy now, bitches?” article from the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, there is a very important ingredient missing from the new iPhone SDK.

You may have noticed this Missing Feature when using your iPhone to read e-mail.

Its the feature that made RIM’s Blackberry so successful.

Guessed it yet?

The only thing iPhone does outside the context of the currently active application is tell you about incoming phone calls, SMSs, voice mail, and calendar alarms. Therefore, unlike RIM’s Blackberry, you cannot use your email box as a “paging” system or interactive collaboration scheme with your e-mail-bound colleagues.

Okay, granted that Steve says that they will have Mail “push” in the next version of iPhone OS, so the Apple Mail app may overcome this problem, but what about us SDK users?

Having been a Blackberry user for several years, I can tell you the single most useful thing about it was the ability to have the little bugger buzz against your buttocks the instant you receive an incoming email message. Especially if it was a meeting invite, whereupon you could immediately accept or decline. It made for very efficient and effective inter-office communications … perfect for someone who doesn’t sit at their desk in front of their computer all day long.

iPhone’s Email application only checks your mail boxes when you invoke the application. It wont tell you about inbound email when your phone is in any other application, or at the main menu screen. Worse still, you have to wait for the Mail application to talk to all of your IMAP/POP servers while you sit and stare at the spinning wheel-of-progress in order to see if there is anything for you. No such thing as downloading your emails in the background, ready and waiting for you to read them the instant you invoke the Mail app.

So, what does this mean for you excited iPhone SDK downloaders? That’s right. You aren’t going to be able to do that either with your apps. No RSS feed readers telling you asynchronously when there are new stories to read. No instant messaging applications that will buzz your butt when the boss needs to tell you to pick up milk on the way home from the office.

iPhone is not a RIM killer. Yet. (Hint Hint, Apple)

Steve Job’s press conference today about the iPhone Software Development Kit was to me better than I had hoped in many ways.

• Going after the Enterprise. Apple is making iPhone interoperate with Microsoft Exchange server. A huge factor in making the iPhone viable for business users.
• An awesome desktop simulator, for developing, testing, debugging iPhone apps, including an excellent performance metric tool.
• Availability of the Cocoa API.
• Excellent support for games, and alliances with Games publishers (Is iPhone going after the NDS and PSP?)
• Apple will be providing marketing, distribution and deployment services for a 30% cut for all applications, and for free, for Freeware applications, through their AppStore.

Check out Apple’s iPhone Dev Center