What to Expect from the Open iPhone

March 10, 2008 — -- With its easy-to-use touch screen and slick software--including Apple's iTunes--the iPhone is the darling of the cell-phone industry. And last week, Apple made an announcement that only enhances the phone's appeal. The Cupertino, CA, company unveiled a set of new features for the phone that allow it to work well with business software, including e-mail and data-synching software. And crucially, the company released the instructions for the iPhone's hardware, offering a software development kit (SDK) that lets programmers outside Apple peek inside the gadget and write their own applications for it.

Anyone who uses an iPhone will soon reap the benefits of the phone's new capabilities--from accessing business e-mail, to running familiar desktop programs, to exploiting the built-in accelerometer for new gesture-based interfaces.

"This is a huge deal," says Ken Case, CEO of Omni Group, a company that implements ideas from David Allen's Getting Things Done in organizational software for the Mac operating system. "Apple has built this small handheld computer that's based around the same fundamental technology of the Mac. What [the SDK] means for us is that we now have the opportunity to build software that people have been clamoring for since the iPhone was announced." Case says that Omni plans to make an iPhone version of its "to-do list on steroids" that will capture data using the phone's camera and incorporate location information made available through the development kit. Omni's software could, for instance, automatically pull up a list of grocery items when it recognizes that the user has entered a store.

Businesses will be more likely to dole out iPhones to employees because, in addition to e-mail compatibility and synching ability, Apple is now offering a way for employees to access business servers that are behind firewalls. Moreover, the phones can be cleared of all data remotely, if they are lost or stolen. And Salesforce.com, a business services company, has already built applications using the iPhone development kit. "I think what you're going to see is, just the release of the enterprise integration alone is going to drive substantial business sales [of the iPhone]," says Raven Zachary, a software developer who started iPhoneDevCamp, a series of workshops to spur development of Web-based iPhone applications. "You'll see people leaving their BlackBerrys at the office."