iPhone OS 3.0, a natural evolution to maturity

Last night, I had an interesting conversation with an old friend of mine about the iPhone. He had mentioned to me that he was interested in getting one, but from the way he commented on it, it seemed clear that he wasn't up to speed with what an iPhone can do. I reffered him to the iPhone OS 3.0 presentation video on iTunes and suggested that he watch it, that way he could make up his mind if this was the kind of thing that he thought he would be getting into it.

As it turns out, he really wasn't up to speed with what an iPhone or iPod Touch can do and was totally blown away by what he saw. I can simpathyze with that, as it truly is pretty impressive, but all-in-all I consider most of the new iPhone features to be the natural evolution of what was already there.

That does not, in any way, diminish the merrits of Apple's product development team, quite the contrary. Most of those features that, in hindsite, seem like the obvious evolution of the capabilities in the existing version, could have been implemented by other companies, but they weren't. Apple has been consistent in delivering on a vision of simplicity and power and the iPhone OS 3.0 seems to fit just fine into this pattern.

All the powerful new features that such inApp purchasing and peer-to-peer connectivity over bluetooth seem almost trivial for the users to interact with and present a clear and consistent interface, regardless of the application that is in use. The iPhone OS is quickly maturing intoa fine platform for running all kinds of applications and we are likely to see its use get a big boost when version 3.0 of the software is out, and that is not even considering what new hardware Apple might have planned for release this year.