There were a bunch of cool things announced in San Francisco today for the new iPhone:

-awesome SDK stuff including PUSH service for things like IM, gaming, the APP Store

-GPS

-Enterprise Support

-MobileME

Surely I do not need to get into any information about the acutal 3G iPhone that was released today. There are a ton of Blog posts about that. So we need to analyze a couple of things that took away from the excitement of the WWDC 2008. It pretty much boils down to one thing. iPhone software 2.0.

Lets take a look at what the new “features of this will be”

- Contact Search - this should have been implemented from day one

- iWork and Microsoft Office Doc support- This is a plus

- Bulk Delete mail, and save attachments- finally, overall good

- Scientific Calculator- Who cares

- Parental controls - If you are a parent in need of Parental controls, your kid probably does not deserve an iPhone.

-NEW LANGUAGES!!- OH MY GOSH, WHO GIVES A CRAP!

Free for iPhone users/ $9.99 for Touch users

I think the only we were really looking for was AppStore and GPS, but what about the others!? Here is what we expected and didn’t see with Firmware 2.0 and 3G iPhone:

-iChat (will probably show up later)

-VIDEO SUPPORT

-improved camera/front mounted camera/flash

-landscape text

-improved storage

-MMS

-COPY/PASTE

The list goes on and on. If I saw at least MMS, I would be a bit happier but at the moment I am a bit steamed. The new iPhone is gorgeous, which i hope to get in white, but new features will not have me going the extra mile to get it.

-Jake

When i saw this video on TUAW, the mere hope for the existence of gamig on an iPhone/iPod touch was suddenly resurrected from grave in which it was buried after seeing ZERO development for this. The closest that I have seen to a first person shooter on these devices worthy of mentioning is Yeti3D, released not too long ago, via installer app. But even with the advancement of Yeti3d’s workflow, I felt there is still lots and lots of work that needs to be done before we can really start “gaming” on our iPhones. As you can see in this video, we are not only now dealing with a FPS in portable format, but a named FPS, Quake 3. Now if you think it cannot get any better than that the video (below) shows the ever so awesome quake playing in full, graphics, no lag, and 100% multiplayer!!! This LAN demo will show the realtime fragging from one iPod to the next. This is nothing short of amazing, and what tops it off is the fact is the controls are all accelerometer based! People are going to say that this video may be fake, but this would have to be a 100% sync, which i don’t think is possible. Look out for news about this, and hopefully a revolution will begin shortly…

-Jake
via TUAW

The San Francisco based video game dev tool provider announced today that they will be releasing a Unity engine for the iPhone! This means high grade 3D quality awesomeness will soon be developed for iPhone exclusively. The company states:

“With iPhone support, Unity is poised to become the single source for game developers who want to create best-of-breed, 3D-quality games that can be easily and quickly ported to all platforms, including consoles, devices, PC/Mac, and now, the iPhone,” said David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. “Specifically, Unity’s support of iPhone addresses the developer’s need to create more and better mobile/portable games that support the consumers ‘on-the-go’ lifestyle.”

I predict a portable iPhone only game controller soon …

keep your eyes open.

story and photo courtesy of unity3d.com

-Jake

Since I was was born I was able to support any and every Apple product made. After so many achievements they have made with the consumer with beautiful, powerful hardware, and seamlessly integrated software, there is only one question to be had: “Where are the GAMES?!” Everyone knows these machines, even laptops, are fully capable of running them. Yes, yes you CAN run Boot Camp then play, but who wants to partition 3gb right away just to install stupid Windows, then have to dual boot just for a couple of hours of leisure time? Only those who are desperate. I read an article in Joystiq not too long ago, and it was pretty much saying that research shows Mac users dont want to game… WTF? I do not know where these numbers are coming from but a lot of the TRUE computer gamers that I know use Macs, and have a separate machine to enjoy gaming. Apple needs to get with it, and collaborate with the gaming community. No one can argue either.. If i wanted to play Call of Duty 2 or Halo, I would be fine, but i don’t! I want to play Gears, Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Crysis, etc! Hopefully Crossover becomes fully integrated soon. They seem to be the only ones help out Mac Gamers.

-Jake