iPhone Push services are the death of SMS

Today Apple invited iPhone developers to test out the new version of AOL Instant Messenger for the iPhone. The big different? Push notifications are now live.

It flat out works great.

Its now possible to send messages to iPhone users, and they will always get the notification, regardless of what apps they have open, or if the phone is in standby. Previously the only two things that would always notify the phone were actual phone calls and SMS messages.

This is the beginning of the end for SMS. The most over-priced 'feature' of phones is finally being attacked. Not by laws, not by outrage, but by innovation.

Thanks Apple!

App Stores are Hard

Walt Mossberg:

The Pre’s biggest disadvantage is its app store, the App Catalog. At launch, it has only about a dozen apps, compared with over 40,000 for the iPhone, and thousands each for the G1 and the modern BlackBerry models. Even worse, the Pre App Catalog isn’t finished. It’s immature, it’s labeled a beta, and Palm has yet to release the tools for making Pre apps available to more than a small group of developers.

In fact, during my testing, one of my downloads from the App Catalog caused my Pre to crash disastrously — all my email, contacts and other data were wiped out, and the phone was unable to connect to the Sprint network or Wi-Fi. Palm conceded the catastrophe was due to problems it still has getting the App Catalog to work with the phone’s internal memory, and explained that this is one reason it hasn’t widely distributed the developer tools.

Maybe this is why Apple released the App store a year after the iPhone had been on the market?