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The biggest Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) news this week is the company's unveiling of its iPhone software roadmap and software development kit (SDK), which will let third-party developers create standalone applications for iPhone.
In other news this week, bloggers mulled over insights from Apple's annual meeting for shareholders (including CEO Steve Jobs' comment that Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) Flash would not come to iPhone in the foreseeable future), tore apart the Time Capsule, figured out that Hollywood has been slow to deliver movies to Apple, and are talking about 3G iPhone delivery predictions.
iPhone 2.0 Software Apps and the Enterprise
At a special media event for analysts and journalists Thursday, Apple dropped series of big iPhone announcements, the first of which was the beta for its iPhone 2.0 software, scheduled for release in June. The new software is needed for third-party developers and enterprise customers who'll be developing apps for the iPhone -- or rolling it out through their businesses.
The reason for the early release? The iPhone 2.0 beta release contains both the iPhone SDK and new enterprise features like support for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Exchange ActiveSync. ActiveSync will give enterprise customers secure, over-the-air push email, contacts, and calendars, not to mention the ability to remotely destroy the contents of any iPhones that happen to fall into the wrong hands.
The Apple-focused blog world was all over the news, with readers posting comments in a cyclone of activity.
"Wow. I thought the birth of my first child was the greatest day of my life, but the release of the iPhone SDK just might take the cake," noted Marty--MacFly on Gizmodo's roundup coverage of the Apple event.
The excitement from the developer community, it seems, was so large that it apparently crashed -- or at least drastically slowed -- Apple's servers, where the SDK could be downloaded.
"This is really exciting, and I absolutely cannot wait until developer.apple.com starts working again and I can get my hands on the SDK! A lot of people on the rumor forums will probably complain that new stuff for regular users wasn't released today, but try and understand -- this was always going to be an announcement for developers. I am really, really glad that we can download a beta of the SDK and get started right away -- I was worried that they'd just announce more details and make us wait some more. There are going to be a lot of exciting iPhone applications appearing very soon!" noted adrian.oconnor on AppleInsider.com's post on the subject.
The Wide Wide World of iPhone
With the announcement is the widespread notion that the iPhone world just got exponentially bigger.
"What was shown was enterprise features that have been widely requested and the ability to create anything else," Arnold Kim, editor of MacRumors.com, told MacNewsWorld.
"I think the enterprise features are great and necessary for Apple to infiltrate the business market; however, the release of a relatively unhindered SDK opens up far more possibilities. Games are just a flashy example of what can be created, but suddenly, the iPhone and iPod touch have become an entirely new platform," Kim explained, noting that he expects to see a huge uptick in iPhone adoption as the SDK results in more sales 
and visibility for the iPhone.
Fake Steve's Take
Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Forbes journalist Daniel Lyons), posting on his spoof blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, put it this way: "The coming onslaught of new applications will make iPhone the only smart phone that anyone in the entire world will ever want to use.
"Seriously, folks, it's game over. This announcement today is as big as the announcement of the original Macintosh in 1984. At airports all around the world they put flights on hold so that people could stay in the terminal and watch the news as it was announced. In Canada they declared a national day of mourning for RIM (Research In Motion). It's that huge," he added.
Inside Apple
In non-SDK news this week, Apple's shareholder meeting got a lot of blog attention. One topic addressed at the meeting coincided with a story in Fortune magazine that alleged Jobs kept his pancreatic cancer diagnosis a secret for 9 months (his surgery for the cancer was successful) even though the whole thing happened years ago. Still, if Jobs were to be hit by a bus, the shareholder question of the moment was, "Who would succeed Jobs as CEO?"
While Fake Steve could certainly step in, the real Jobs noted that there are multiple qualified candidates already working within Apple who could step in at any time. COO Tim Cook may be one possible candidate in the event of a bus accident.
No Flash?
Also at the shareholder meeting, Jobs said that Flash Lite doesn't go far enough and that the full Flash Player runs too slowly on the iPhone, disappointing many a Web-browsing iPhone lover. Still, could the state of Flash possibly be true? Do other devices handle Flash well?
"The bottom line is that Flash isn't optimized in any way at this point in time for mobile environments and devices, and Flash Lite is targeted directly at lower-end feature phones -- primarily as a UI tool," Tony Rizzo, director of mobile software analysis for The 451 Group, told MacNewsWorld.
What about EDGE, 3G, and WiFi? Is Internet browsing speed much of a factor? Not really, it turns out. "There is more to successful delivery than simply more bandwidth," Rizzo noted.
Time Capsule Dismantled
Once Apple's Time Capsule starting shipping in late February, it didn't take long for the tech curious to tear it apart to take a look inside. The Time Capsule is basically an Apple Airport Extreme wireless router with hard drive inside that works like a network attached storage drive ... and most importantly, it works with Apple's backup solution, Time Machine.
The guts of the Time Capsule revealed the hard drive manufacturer and model: a Hitachi (NYSE: HIT) Deskstar 7,200 rpm SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drive, which may or may not be a "server-grade" hard drive, as Apple originally touted when it announced the Time Capsule.
"To me what makes a hard drive 'server-grade' is these hard drives are more rigorously tested. That means that they typically guarantee over 1 million hours Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), assuming 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week usage. It also means that manufactures are proud to quote MTBF on their Data Sheets so that IT managers have numbers to quote to their IT departments," noted Victor Cajiao on his Typical Mac User Podcast blog.
"If you look at the Data Sheet for the Time Capsules' Hatachi drives, you see some very impressive statistics clearly showing this is a very fast, as well as a heat and power efficient drive. However, there are no MTBF stats quoted in the Data Sheet. Compare that to the Barracuda ES.2 Hard Drives data sheet which clearly states under the 'reliability section' a MTBF number of 1.2 Million hours. That same statistic does not appear anywhere in the HITHACI [sic] Desktar 7K100 Data Sheet," he explained, noting that while he's no hard drive expert, it's hard to see how the Hitachi drives are "server-grade."
In Time Capsule coverage on TidBITS, Glenn Fleishman quoted Apple Senior Product Manager Jai Chulani as clarifying the issue, noting that the "server-grade" drives in a Time Capsule are the same 7,200 rpm drives used for Apple's Xserve servers, and that they have a higher mean time between failure (MTBF) rating than consumer drives. The MTBF for server-grade drives is often 1 million hours (114 years), which is a measure of probability; in this case, that out of a set of drives with similar properties, an extremely high percentage will still be fully functional after several years, Fleishman reported.
Hollywood Movies
With February 2008 long gone, Apple's promise to deliver 1,000 movies to the iTunes rental store by the end of February remains unfulfilled. The number of available rentals fell short by hundreds, and of the promised 100 HD rentals, only a handful were missing.
At the shareholders meeting, Jobs noted that it was taking movie studios more time than expected to get approval from various rights holders. For anyone familiar with Hollywood contracts, this excuse shouldn't be surprising at all.
Still, aside from the guys sitting on their couches counting up all the little movie graphics available on their HDTV screens, is this a big deal ?
"Apple will get there eventually. Remember, this is plan B for Apple, so they didn't have a lot of time to line all of this up. But the rights are available -- Apple just needs to meet the studios' terms like everyone else, including Vudu, Xbox 360, and CinemaNow," James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst and vice president of research, told MacNewsWorld.
"Honestly, because the studios are hamstringing online rental with silly policies like 30-day windows and 24-hour viewing periods, none of this is going to amount to billions of dollars anyway, so Apple isn't missing a giant opportunity by taking a few extra weeks to get to 1,000 movies. Vudu is hoping it takes them a lot longer because the title selection is the one thing Vudu had going for it," he added.
3G iPhone in Q2 '08?
While the news that Apple will deliver a 3G-based iPhone in 2008 is nothing new, the exact timing remains a carefully guarded secret. Citigroup's Richard Gardner reportedly claimed that sources within a Taiwanese electronics company have confirmed the 3G iPhone will be released in the second quarter of this year. While not exactly a pinpoint timeline, the second quarter spans three months and has at least a 25 percent chance of accuracy.
In addition to a lack of 3G services available in some regions of the U.S. -- which AT&T (NYSE: T) has said it's working on -- older generations of 3G chipsets sucked too much power to be useful in the first-generation iPhone, according to Apple. Newer chipsets promise to be more efficient.
"Good news. When the iPhone was first released, I didn't really have a use for 3G because my city wasn't covered yet. Now it is. I'm looking forward to this update and will be happy to sell my current iPhone when the time comes," noted justflie on a MacRumors.com comment on the topic.
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