“Secret” iPhone Features on Sept 9th?
September 8, 2008 – 8:00 am
Oh how I love the pre-event rumors that surround Apple’s media events. Forget Jerry Seinfeld - I am looking at you Microsoft - this is marketing done right. The Internet is churning with rumors about the event and the products that will be unveiled. You can’t buy this kind of advertising.
It has already been noted that Apple’s PR department has described this as “A big deal” when encouraging the press to show up. The same article stated that Steve Jobs will be hosting the event.
So what is likely to be announced? I would be on an iTunes update, a new iPod nano, and …. wait for it …. iPhone 2.1 software. Why is this a big deal? Well, I suspect that the famous “One Last Thing” will be TomTom GPS Navigation software for the iPhone. The best way to get people to forget about all of the trouble that the iPhone 2.0 software and the iPhone 3G has had would be to wave a big shiny new feature in front of everyones face.
ArsTechnica reported way back on June 10th that TomTom had the software ready to go. That leaves a good 4 months of time to test the software before launch. TomTom also stated that the only thing keeping them from launching the software was a section of the iPhone SDK agreement preventing its release. It has also been noted that these terms were likely taken verbatim from Google.
Take this all with a grain of salt. I have no concrete information to support this, but I have seen enough of these launch events to call it an educated guess. We will find out soon enough. If I am correct I will be making a beeline for the nearest AT&T store to buy a 3G.
