Apple To Unveil iPhone Software Roadmap March 6
February 28th, 2008

As reported yesterday, Apple’s iPhone software roadmap will be officially unveiled in March. Although it will not meet the company’s original February timeframe, Apple has sent out an invitation to a 10:00 iPhone focused event on March 6 at their Cupertino headquarters which will focus not only on an iPhone software development kit (SDK), but also much awaited enterprise functionality for corporations and also educational institutions. Additionally, the event is likely to cover future global availablity of the iPhone, which is currently only officially available in the US, UK and parts of Europe.

For those not familiar with the term, SDK is defined in Wikipedia as “a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to create applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating system, or similar platform.” Though there are a number of third party solutions allowing applications to be installed on iPhones with modified firmware, Apple’s SDK will for the first time allow iPhone users access to fully featured applications without having to hack their phones. These applications are expected require a digital signature from Apple before they will run on the iPhone and will be distributed through iTunes. Apple is expected to start distributing the SDK soon after the event, but other than a few demonstration applications (including a dictaphone), third party applications will only start to come available early April.

Next on the agenda is enterprise and education. One of the key issues corporate users have with the iPhone is lack of Exchange support. While this may seem like a small problem to those that don’t rely on the system, it can be a major headache for those that require it. Apple has shown that it is not afraid to support Microsoft standards, with support for displaying Office documents in emails. How Apple will go about adding Exchange support is unclear. The most likely scenario at this stage is that Apple will keep it simple and offer direct compatibility for Exchange within the iPhone, although some suspect Apple is developing its own equivalent of Exchange that would be able to interact with Microsoft’s system.

iPhone University will be part of a return to the company’s traditional education market. Along with internationally recognized tertiary institutions Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Yale who will be implementing the new system, Abilene Christian University (ACU), a far less known university, has already revealed some details on how the system will be implemented. Being the first in the US to do so, the University will be offering first year students the option of an iPod touch or iPhone to use to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their lecturers’ offices, and check their meal and account balances - among more than 15 other useful web applications already developed, said ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts. The program is expected to be offered to other universities soon after initial trials.

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