Apple has just announced yet another milestone for its popular App Store: 50,000 applications are now available in the store. The announcement was made at the WWDC event in San Francisco, alongside the news that Apple has sold some 40 million iPhones and iPod touches.
This follows Apple hitting its 1 billionth app download in April, and 35,000 apps later that month. The platform shows no sign of slowing down and that’s bad news for rivals, including the new Palm Pre, which launched on Saturday with about 49,981 fewer apps.
Apple went on to show off some of the iPhone 3.0 features — there are over 100 new ones, and over 1,000 new APIs. Unfortunately, it looks like MMS support in the U.S. won’t be available until later this summer — an AT&T hold up, apparently. As we already heard previously, cut, copy and paste will be in 3.0 — something desired by many users for a long time.
Apple also unveiled a way to rent and purchase movies right from your iPhone through iTunes on the device over the air. You can also buy TV Shows, music video and audiobooks. There is also now iTunes U support on the iPhone.
It looks like Apple has finally figured out the tricky parental limitation issue, as this is now built-in to the iPhone. This works not only with movies and TV shows, but more importantly with apps. This should resolve some of those silly application rejections in the App Store now.
Tethering will now work with both Macs and PCs. It works wired through USB or over Bluetooth, Apple calls it “seamless,” indicating that it is super easy to set up. It will be rolling out “later.” Which drew jeers from the crowd.
JavaScript will be 3 times faster in the new version of Safari for the iPhone. And it will support HTML 5 — a new standard that Google highlighted the importance of during its Google I/O conference two weeks ago.
The new “Find My iPhone” feature drew cheers. If you lose your iPhone anywhere and have a MobileMe account, you can find exactly where your iPhone is on a map on the web. You can also ping your iPhone remotely, which puts out an alert noise to show where it is. And if it is really stolen, you can now send a remote wipe command, to delete everything on the phone. A nice feature.
Demos of a health application in which you can remotely monitor someone’s vital signs, in-app purchases through a bookstore app and TomTom turn-by-turn navigation all drew cheers as well.
A new ZipCar application is pretty cool. You can make the horn honk and unlock your borrowed car right from the iPhone app.
iPhone 3.0 will be available June 17. Developers get the gold master today.
Just one more thing… Steve Jobs.
Among those 40 million Iphones and ipod touch sold; I have one ipod touch :0
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Closed enviroments never last. The IPhone is toast unless it opens up.
Opens Up? Toast? With 40M, I don’t think they need to worry about opening up. Bill Gates better get a developer account on the App Store!!!
ROFL, sorry what… again ROFL too funny!
iPhone is not a closed environment. It’s a hardware that can be a part of a closed environment, it still can be jailbroken and set free.
It has not been an absolutely closed environment since the first SDK.
incorrect… OSX is over 90% open, Windows is 100% closed, which one… until recently succeeded?
the iPhone OS will soon surpass the Linux installed base, think about it.
any news on a new device yet? Or is the 3.0 software the only fanfare we can expect?
awesome… awesome… awesome!!!
We’ve been developing both for iPhone and other mobile phones for quite a while and I can state that I love Apple for being so friendly to the developers. There are some small dents here and there but in general this is the GREAT COMPANY treating developers well and doing a great business.
Nokia rolled out it’s own appstore – Ovi – we’ve been playing with it since day one and I can tell that I started to love Apple even more after that.
Apple just needs a device that kinesthetic people like me can use. Current iPhone (and iPod Touch) hardware is really useless for people who prefer to feel things rather than look at them.
“……about 49,981 fewer apps” ..i LOLed… please say something about new iPhone.. i`m going mad..
still ..CutCopyPaste …nice one.
I’m sorry, but this is all really lame. I hope the people who paid thousands of dollars for their seats feel they received their money’s worth with all this filler. Seriously, wasn’t the iPhone 3.0 software released at the last conference?
Is that it? No new iPhone announced? Very disappointing.
Duh. Apple released a new iPhone. Yeah!
how many 3rd party apps did Apple go live with when the first iphone came out??? oh wait…..
Thats the point I was looking for!
MG is too pessimistic
Do ypu like bold MG?
49950 more apps than are needed. I suppose Apps are like music now where you listen to a song and if you like it you will listen again, if not you just wasted $.99
iphone 3.0 apple’s latest launch seems to attract iphone fans towards it. It’s got attractive features like renting and purchasing movies through itunes and another application of tracking out your iphone easily if it gets misplaced or robbed. lastly, they’ve got a new zipcar application which can make the horn honk and unlock your car from your iphone. This is yet another achievement for apple.
Tethering rolled out “later”. As in, next millennium??? Somebody sue AT&T. They are screwing us on a so-called “unlimited plan”. If it is unlimited, why would they block tethering?
MG, since you’re having so many problems with Comcast, you should initiate a class action against AT&T.
I love my iphone, I keep wondering what else cool apples is going to come out with in the next 5 years! Maybe they will come out with a phone that gets put in your brain and they will call it the B-Phone! No head phones for your music ah that would be great but how would you charge it?