VoIP telephony provider Jajah has stated on their official blog that they will be providing service for the Apple iPhone right from the launch date.
The Jajah service provides free and cheap calls between users of the service and to regular landlines and mobiles, pretty much like lots of other VoIP providers. The main difference they have is that the simplicity of using their Java applet and now their Dashboard Widget.
This is exciting news for users who are expecting to be able to get third party widgets for their Apple iPhone.
In a smart move by Gomadic to become the first offering Apple iPhone accesories, they already have various types of chargers, leather cases, holders and sync cables. Compatibility with the iPhone isn’t certified anywhere on the site, though.
Found this hand-on demo of the Apple iPhone from CBS News at YouTube. Basically, it’s the same stuff Steve Jobs showed, but you can see the actual phone working.
You only need to read one or two posts from this blog to know that I heavily vouch for open 3rd party development on the iPhone, and recently, Jason from Signal vs. Noise, described a great feature he thinks the Apple iPhone needs: finger gestures.
Finger gestures (he calls them “trails”) are shortcuts you would use on your iPhone for any custom action you want, like calling somebody you call frequently, or opening your favorite widget. You just draw a simple form on the iPhone’s screen and the shortcut gets executed. It’s just a similar idea to mouse gestures, included in browsers like Opera and Firefox (with an extension). And with the iPhone’s multitouch screen interface, finger gestures could be a lot more useful!
Just imagine how easy and intuitive would be to slide two fingers up the screen to send your contact information to a friend through Bluetooth. Well, that’s just one of the many shortcuts you could have with this system (actually kind of copied from Palm OS).
So far, Steve Jobs or Apple haven’t shown this feature as being part of the iPhone, and they still have time to include something like this before the market launch of the iPhone, or in future revisions, but this also shows how much this device could improve if 3rd party application developers could tap into it, adding new features and functions.
What other features you would like to see on the iPhone that could be easily added through software?
Not really too useful, but Lexink has developed an iPhone Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard. All it does is show hot news related to Apple, but is a way to feel a bit closer to owning an iPhone.
Today, Apple released the Dashcode Developer Beta toolkit for OS X Tiger, and it seems like a weird coincidence. Many developers are expecting this is a sign of Apple opening to 3rd party widget development for the iPhone. I have installed the toolkit and so far haven’t found anything related to the iPhone (they probably learned from previous leaks in iTunes).
The beta version expires on July 15, 2007, but the application will be part of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard release.
The world is waiting to know if you are going to be able to develop widgets for the iPhone, I’ll keep investigating and let you know what I can find.
This is probably the most interesting photo I’ve seen of the iPhone prototype that was shown at Macworld 2007. It reads:
This device has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commision. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.
Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.
You can then read the model number, A1203, plus the serial number YM651031D22 and, strangely, the IMEI of the iPhone prototype 004401520034600. A great capture by protohiro.
Steve Jobs recently clarified the situation regarding third party applications and widgets on the Apple iPhone. Third party applications will be available to buy and install, but apparently there will be some sort of developer certification program and applications will have to be approved by Apple.
“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”
This is good news for many users, and even though we agree that an iPhone is a device that has to work everytime, regardless of what you install on it, this pretty much leaves independant developers out, as it doesn’t seem home brewed applications will be usable.
Well, we still don’t know if the Apple iPhone widgets will be the same as OS X Dashboard widgets, but know which widgets we want to have on our iPhone when we get it as soon as it is released in June (and you can too by getting into our sponsored giveaway):
In a smart move by 
Today, Apple released the 
From a New York Times article.
