misc notes on iphone 3.0
Long time readers won’t be surprised to learn that I’m seriously considering installing the beta of iPhone v3 for one single feature alone – landscape mode in Mail, Notes and SMS. Like many others, I can probably count on three fingers the number of times I’ve missed not having copy & paste, but every single day there are two fat thumbs that long to romp through the landscape.
Other misc notes on v3:
-
Matt Jones is right on the money -- the hardware integration stuff is big news, and an area that’s wide open for crazy innovation in all sorts of verticals.
-
Mmmm, push notification services. I didn’t see any news mentions of developer pricing for that, so I assume they didn’t discuss it. This is something to watch: ESPN delivering sports scores is one thing (there are a limited number of sporting events in a year)…messaging apps are another. The use case of real-time messaging notifications (Twitter DMs, IM alerts, etc.) is going to be an interesting one from a pricing perspective, since the volume and timing of those are, by definition, out of the application developer’s control.
-
In-app purchases are also going to be very interesting from a pricing and user behavior perspective. In their conversation at SxSW, Chris Anderson and Guy Kawaski touched on the psychology of charging even $0.01 v. giving things away for free, and the mental transaction cost involved in making the decision to pay more than zero for an item. The context for that conversation was “the web,” so we’ll see if the context of “the bright shiny phone” changes that at all.
-
I’m assuming that a developer could use the in app purchase mechanism to sell a subscription or bundle of push notification messages. App developers are going to have to get savvy about pricing and business models – the guys at Pinch Media have to be loving all the things they heard yesterday.
-
I’m frankly surprised by the iPod library access APIs – I’m imagining a whole new slew of UIs for browsing and playing and interacting with your own media. Paul Lamere showed some cool music library visualization stuff from Sun’s Search Inside the Music project at SxSW – I’d love to see some of that work / thinking end up on a pocket-sized multitouch display.
Until all that stuff surfaces, though, I’m gonna be happy with my landscaped keyboard. Because on my phone, I’m all thumbs.