Apple iPhone Opens Up -- Next Year

In an open letter, Steve Jobs finally said it: Apple will be delivering an SDK for the iPhone, allowing third party developers to write new applications on the phone. While they want to make it an open platform to developers, the phone will also need to be protected against viruses and malware "that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network". Wow, scary picture there. However, the developer community can get its hands on the SDK next year - sometime in February - as Apple is still working on an "advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone".

What's more, using the SDK you will also be able to develop applications for the iPod touch. Hopefully the SDK will be available for Windows and not just the Mac.

In other mobile developer news, Nokia announced a touch user interface for the popular Nokia S60 smartphones. This UI comes with support for tactile feedback - something missing on the iPhone - sending back a physical pulse when the user taps on the screen. There's also a new UI Accelerator toolkit that allows device manufacturers to develop graphical effects and new types of interactions rapidly. With integrated Flash Video the web browser on the S60 phone can access sites such as YouTube.