Since there is a lot of buzz right now around the January 27th Apple event, I am adding myself to the long list of what to expect. There are at least a couple things that I will be expecting (and not expecting) from that event:
- as everyone else the iSlate or iPad or whatever name Apple will be using will be announced. I have heard of that project indirectly more than 2 years ago while I was still working at Apple Inc in Cupertino. So 2 years later seems a good time for the product to be released,
- a new iPhone OS will be made available that day : like others sites have reported the new iPhone OS does not contains a lot of reference to the new product and this is why there was no update for a while for the iPhone OS. But what convince me that an update is coming on 01/27 is that I have reported a nasty security issue in Mail on iPhone and Mail on Mac OS X more than 3 months ago. The bug in Mail iPhone is still not fixed but the one on Mac OS X has been fixed earlier this week with the security update. The nasty security issue in Mail on iPhone is I am sure fixed by now, but most likely Apple did not want to release a single security issue, and waited for the next iPhone OS to have it patch. And to be more accurate the bug appears in Mail but the underlying issue is in the underlying layer for Quicktime and the way Mail deal with some HTML mail, so it could have impacted a larger set of projects
- I will not be surprise that Apple will announce that they have approved X thousands of new applications and Y thousdands of applications update since January 1st 2010. As many developers have reported the AppStore review process has been way faster since January 1st, and as usual Apple will use one of such event to brag of the size of the AppStore
- it will not be too surprising neither that Apple will release a new version of iWork / iLife since it will be the appropriate release cycle for those products. In addition the online site iwork.com will be coming out of beta and most likely will receive a long awaited iPhone client application -you can see my rejected iPhone application WorkMatter which was available since february 2009 but never accepted by Apple
- iTunes will as usual get some update including the iTunes store to support the new device. I will not expect yet the Lala.com acquisition to show up yet in iTunes, but it will not be surprising that in the future the iTunes store (or part of it) will be totally browsable through any browser. The latest iTunes store updated moved away from the custom XML markup that was used to render all pages to be more HTML oriented and my bet is that in the future they want to make the store browsable at least on any browser that support HTML 5. The iTunes app will not go away since it's a good hub for managing all the music, videos, apps but making the content viewable anywhere is just now a few step away
- on the MobileMe front I am not expecting any real announcement. Since the less than glorious launch MobileMe has been in the quiet mode trying to improve the system slowly. Things may have improved overall but I don't see that group able to release anything worst a major announcement anytime soon. You can notice that since the failed launch the MobileMe group has been busy fixing the sync'ing issue, trying to improve the performance of their web apps but still not back where they should be : Webmail for MobileMe is still a major pig and has not reached back the performance it used to have during the DotMac days. MobileMe has released 2 iPhone apps in 18 months, with the second on being release just a couple weeks ago. It just show that the team has been focusing on many other things than trying to be fully integrated in the Apple ecosystem around the iPhone & iPod Touch. The only new thing I could see coming soon from MobileMe will be the "Find My iPhone" feature working on Mobile Safari.
So here you go ! This is what I am guessing... Less than a week and we will see !