Apple released its SDK for iPhone and iPod Touch on Thursday and it is a pretty big deal. When you look at what the Cocoa Touch platform is capable of, its pretty impressive. Developers will be able to write some pretty impressive apps with all the advanced web, imagining, location, and other APIs available.
Apple has gone about as far as it can with audio and video on the iPod. Now its time to turn it into something else. Their strategy is to attack the 1B unit mobile phone market and become the must have portable device of the next decade. I think it will work. None of their competitors in the mobile phone space have this level of software expertise. They will all tell you that they have their own SDKs and have had for a long time. That's correct, but where are the killer apps? Apple is going to have thousands of sexy, easy to use, extremely powerful network aware applications. As John Doerr said, this is bigger than the PC.
What I am really excited about is games. The most compelling demo was Sega's Super Monkey Ball using the 3-axis accelerometer although the touchscreen demo of the space fighter game was cool too. The iPhone is now a gaming platform on par in terms of capabilities with the DS and even better in several ways. You could really see Apple start to put a hurt on the console guys if they finally get their shit together and do a good job of courting the game developer community.
Apple has a target of 10M iPhones by the end of this year. I think they will hit that. But there are 60M DSes out there. Apple is going to seriously need to get the numbers up to become as economical a platform as Nintendo.
This is very exciting stuff. They iPhone has nowhere to go but up.
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