The source said that the Next G iPhone that Telstra would bring to market was now very competitive with other smart phones in the market and would be a viable alternative to corporate users who have relied on the Blackberry, HTC, i-mate and Treo in the past.
The new iPhone offers compatibility with Microsoft's Exchange Mail Server that rules the messaging world and would allow transmission of images as MMS, when the previous version of the iPhone would only allow images to be emailed.
Apple will use Exchange ActiveSync, a communication protocol that synchronises messages, contacts, calendar items, notes and tasks between a mobile device and an Exchange 2007 server. Unlike tethered sync, which the iPhone previously supported, the synchronisation happens over a mobile network or via a Wi-Fi connection.
The source also pointed out that Telstra and BigPond have been working on iPhone applications. "Games are a huge area of interest and several companies have already demonstrated beta versions of games for the new iPhone. Electronic Arts, for example, has showed a scaled-back version of "Spore", while business application developer, Salesforce.com, has demonstrated how it could push data from its software-as-a-service CRM application to the device."
The Software Developer Kit for the new iPhone has been available for several months and has provided developers access to the iPhone's gesture-based multi-touch screen, animation technology, storage space, the accelerometer (the small sensor that automatically switches between landscape and portrait display), the built-in camera and more.
So with some exceptions, it appears that the sky's the limit as far as what developers work up.
"Telstra has been very interested in the iPhone's mapping capabilities and we have been especially busy looking at ways to take advantage of Apple's new integrated iPhone technologies with applications such as Whereis, Citysearch, GoStay and BigPond Shopping," added the source.
In conjunction with the Telstra and BigPond software the new iPhone will use Global Locate Library software that abstracts assisted GPS commands. The feature should allow the new iPhone to locate its position far more accurately than current solutions and is meant to interface with a Global Locate chip built into a phone. This will also enable geo-tagging of photos taken from the phone's built-in camera, adding the longitude and latitude co-ordinates to a picture's metadata and allowing the photo to be accurately positioned on a map.
The Next G network
Telstra's Next G network covers 99 per cent of the Australian population, an area of more than 2 million square kilometres. The peak network downlink speeds of 14.4Mbps. The network has peak downlink speeds of 14.4Mbps, with plans to reach 21Mbps in 2008 and 42Mbps in 2009.
