One thing that Apple is about to do right, at least from their point of view, before another big gun will is the combination of 3G, a data flatrate, GPS and the ubiquitous connection to the net. And all those bits and bytes will float through the inner tubes of Apple.
Put all of this together and you’ll see how Google starts to look like an innocent kitten whose food was just taken away. But let’s take a look what Apple’s next phone will do.
Usually an application has to run to gather data from the internet. Apple doesn’t allow applications to run in the background of the iPhone. When you close the app, its state is gone for good. But what about, say, an instant messaging tool? IM doesn’t make sense when it cannot get data from outside. To get rid of this problem Apple chose to implement a different system to notify the phone’s OS. These notifications, for various applications at once to safe battery life, make their way through the net to Apple’s servers and from there to your iPhone.
This – more or less – permanent connection between the iPhone and Apple could potentially be a nice way – again from Apple’s side – to gather exact data about where you are and what you do. Location based advertisements, an awesome feature every company would love to have. I’ll promise you that Google will try to put something like this together when they launch Android.
Let’s just hope GPS can be disabled like 3G.