Not a good week for Apple

Two Mashable reports from this week show that it's not been a good one if you're an Apple employee (or fan).

The first story revealed that the international launch of the iPad had been delayed, although admittedly this was because the pre-orders had been higher than expected.

The second is that an iPhone OS 4 beta jailbreak tool has been released, meaning that the hackers must have been busy as Steve Jobs was making the announcement! There again, in today's digital age, hacking rather than copying could be considered the sincerest form of flattery...

iPhone 4.0 Operating System: The Overview

In case you missed it, here's a short video showing Apple's Steve Jobs previewing the new iPhone operating system.

And here's the report from Mashable on the event, highlighting the most important development as the ability to multi-task (have more than one app running at a time). This had been one of the major drawbacks of past and present generations of iPhone, and certainly the one that persuaded many business users to stick with their BlackBerry (where multi-tasking is very do-able).

Jobs also announced iAd, a mobile advertising solution that's built into the iPhone 4.0 OS so that interactive video content can be included in an ad without taking the user out of the application. This is likely to increase click-throughs and generate income for apps developers, while keeping app-addicted users happy. Sounds like it's a good solution.

How does 'freemium' work?

Here's a great video resource (less than 4 minutes long) from BNET about marketing in the mobile space, and the so-called 'freemium' model of giving away phone apps and then getting paid for upgrades and so on.

This is certainly one of the revenue-generating models we're applying to our app developments and suggesting in our proposals, which clients seem to like.