14 DAY TRIAL // Sick of waiting for Apple to make public their real plans with the long expected and highly desired iPhone and iPod Touch Software Development Kit (SDK)? Well, you will only have to wait one more week, because the Cupertino-based company has officially announced a media event that will cover Apple's iPhone's software roadmap, the plans for their much anticipated to-be-launched SDK and "some exciting new enterprise" iPhone related features.
The event will be invite-only and will take place inside Apple's Cupertino campus, as the email distributed invitation stated: "Please join us to learn about the iPhone software roadmap, including the iPhone SDK and some exciting new enterprise features. The event takes place at Apple, Building 4, Town Hall on March 6 at 10:00 a.m. Registration begins at 9:00 a.m. Arrive early for this invitation-only event."
From the looks of it, the iPhone SDK will finally get an official announcement and an attached released date too hopefully, although it will come a little late considering the fact that the previous announced SDK estimated arrival time was sometime during February, as Steve Jobs declared back in October 2007: "Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users."
Also, circling a little around the "some exciting new enterprise features" for the iPhone contained in the email invitation, one can easily estimate the next direction the Apple device will be headed to: the business world, where the real money is and were people quickly fall in love with new gadgets that make their life.
The new enterprise features are still a mystery, but I suppose we will be able to wait another week, a period of time that means almost nothing when compared to the amount of time that passed since Apple first mentioned about the iPhone SDK.
For all we know, Apple could very well launch the SDK and the new software updates that reside in the iPhone Software Roadmap event's schedule. That would be the best thing that could happen and a thing that would definitely make a lot of developers a lot happier than they were while waiting for the SDK arrival.
All this fuss is coming only two days after Apple released the iPhone 1.1.4 firmware version, a firmware update that came with nothing spectacular and that featured only a list of bug fixes with no mention of new included features. This might just be the thing that announces a future (March 6) iPhone update to contain "some exciting new enterprise features"? Or not? We will just have to wait and see what the invitation-only iPhone Software Roadmap event will bring.