Tuesday March 17th 2009 and the stage was set in Cupertino for Apple's keynote on iPhone OS 3.0. The presentation started off with some impressive figures. When Apple launched the original iPhone they set the target of selling 10 million iPhones by December 2008, and the total they had sold as of December 2008? 17 million! Almost double the target, and the combined sales figures for iPhone and iPod Touch were 30 million world wide.

More statistics were presented, but the real meat an potatoes of the event was of course the new version of iPhone OS, so lets get down to the announcements. In this post I am going to focus on the SDK announcements, but I will be posting another iPhone OS 3.0 article on the announcements that directly affect users, so watch this space.

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There were basically 2 parts to the event, the first focussed on the SDK and what new abilities were being afforded to developers. The key announcements were:

• In App Purchase
• Push notification service
• Peer to Peer connectivity
• iPod library access
• Google maps access
• Accessories

Now you could be forgiven for wondering what Accessories means, well this is huge! Apple have built in support to the SDK for hardware developers to not just develop their own add-ons, but to write applications that make use of them. One of the examples given was a means of reading blood pressure and an application that charts it. Effectively developers can now plug anything into the iPod connector of the iPhone or iPod Touch and write "drivers" for it. Expect to see some seriously cool kit coming our way.

One of the other big announcements there is Push notification service. There will not be background running of apps, in fact Scott Forstall mentioned Apple had experimented and found that running a standard instant messaging client on other phones saw an 80% drop in battery life. Instead they have found a better approach is to allow push to any application using an Apple push notification service. This was meant to be factored in to 2.x of the iPhone OS, but Apple admitted they are late with this.

Applications that are paid for can now also sell you add ons, such as bonus levels for games etc which you can buy from within the game. Apple is branching out the way the App store works, and surely this is great news for developers.

Apple have also added in Peer to Peer connectivity. In a nutshell it will allow developers to add multi-player functionality to games but there will undoubtedly be other uses. Such as the ability to exchange contacts between phones directly. With a little imagination, I have no doubt we will see some excellent applications coming out, and in fact one of the demos was a first person shooter (yes an actual FPS) on the iPhone with network play and even voice chat.

But perhaps one of the crucial announcements for anyone who thought that the inclusion of GPS but no way to use it when driving, is turn by turn navigation. Developers can now use CoreLocation and all the power of the assisted GPS the iPhone provides to write their own navigation software. This will be BYOM (Bring Your Own Maps) however, due to licensing issues Apple cannot provide the Google map tiles they have licensed. Lets be honest though, most GPS software companies have their own maps, so my question is this: How long until we see Tom Tom for iPhone? I can't wait.

So there we go, a run down of the key announcements for developers with iPhone 3.0 SDK. Some great announcements, and there are many extra API's that weren't touched on in the keynote. Of course as a registered iPhone developer I will be downloading the new SDK and testing it on my iMac, and will report back on that soon.

Next though, iPhone 3.0 from the customer perspective....