Rapture of the nerds started early

Some eager beaver crawled through apple's website yesterday and found the new 2.0 firmware on a server a day before it was to be released. So the nerd army jumped on it, downloaded the new itunes, installed the new firmware, and started installing 3rd party apps last night. I happen to be a proud member of that nerd army.

I wrote in a previous post about the new 3G iphone being released today, what I didn't explain was that 2 things happen today, the new phone comes out and the new software. The 2.0 software will run on both the new 3G phone, and the current Edge based phones. There are two important differences with the 3G phone, it has better GPS and it's faster. While this is all well and good, the real magic is in the new software, that runs on both phones.

The new software makes the iphone an open platform. 3rd parties can write software that runs on the phone. "So what?" . . . Well thousands of new features are going to be made available. So far there are several hundred new applications available, about half of them are free.

I have put about 12 new applications on my phone. There are new games, that use the accelerometer function in the phone, so you play the game by tilting the phone. There are location based search services, you ask about restaurants and the phone looks up your location, then using online databases looks up restaurants that are close by. These online databases include reviews, details, and other information.

There are applications like ebay, facebook, etc. The advantage here over just using the iphone's browser is there is less information that needs to be transfered so these apps will run much faster.

Pandora has an app, so you can listen to internet radio on your iphone. I installed an app that finds my location and then shows me photos that others have taken in nearby locations.

These apps are nice, but the ultimate capabilities are much more profound. For example, I am a real estate agent, I want to be able to be driving through a neighborhood and have the iphone grab the nearest 20 properties for sale and display them on a map. I want it to use sold comps information and cross reference to zillow to estimate the approximate value of the homes.

I want it to tell me about what my friends are doing and whether or not they are nearby (opt-in of course).

There are and have been other phones that do some of these things already, but none have done them really well, and none have been as appealing. The real power from all network based systems is when they are adopted into the mainstream. Each additional user of the system increases its usefulness, so hopefully apple can get major buy in and mobile computing will become common in the US.