Roadmap Roundup: iPhone 2.0, SDK, and More

Today’s iPhone roadmap event was chock full of news. Here is the quick and dirty breakdown of what all was announced as part of the iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 software.

iPhone Developer SDK
The SDK provides developers with the same APIs as Apple, so they can develop full fledged applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

MacRumors compiled this list of the contents of the SDK:

Cocoa Touch - Multi-touch events, Multi-touch controls, Acceleromter, View Hierarchy, Localization, Alerts, Web View, People Picker, Image Picker, Camera
Media - Core Audio, OpenAL, Audio Mixing, Audio Recording, Video Playback, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDS Quartz, Core Animation, Embedded OpenGL
Core Services -
Collections, Address Book, Networking, File access, SQLite, Core Location, Net Services Threading, Preferences, URL utilities
Core OS – OS X Kernel, BSD TCP/IP, Sockets, Power Management, Keychain, Certificates, File System, Lib System, Security, Bonjour

Application Store
The user will purchase third party applications via the Application Store, a new app with the 2.0 software update. The developer sets the price, $0 included, and gets 70% of the revenue. Apps can be downloaded direct to iPhone, iPod Touch, as songs can be on the iTunes WiFi Store. Apps can also be purchased on iTunes and moved to your iPhone, and developers can push updates direct to the application.

Built in Exchange Support
Apple also announced that it has licensed Exchange ActiveSync from Microsoft, and will build it into iPhone 2.0, so that it can connect to Exchange Servers 2003 and 2007. This provides secure push email, calendars, contacts, and more. This is big for companies holding out because of lack of Exchange support.

The iPhone SDK is available as a beta right now. IT departments can sign up for beta versions of iPhone Software 2.0 with Exchange Support at apple.com. iPhone Software 2.0 will be released as a free update in June of this year.