An Apple rumour a day, the latest: an iPhone SDK delay?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 24 February 2008 06:11

Your IT - Mobility

The latest rumour to hit the iPhone rounds is that – shock horror – Apple may well delay the iPhone’s SDK by one to three weeks, reminiscent of the delay in launching Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.

With less than a week to go before it’s March, Apple only has a few days to deliver on the promise of bringing an SDK to the market by the end of February, an event set to unleashing a flood of authorised third party apps that should deliver many of the features that Apple themselves are still yet to include as standard features.

As we have seen in the unofficial iPhone apps world, there are all kinds of interesting programs around, delivering MMS messaging, voice recording, voice dialling, call history deletion, more professional camera features and, much, much more. Many of the apps, including games, also work on the iPod Touch, for which the SDK is also destined.

Being able to download official apps, whether free or paid, will mean that users won’t need to ‘jailbreak’ their iPhones just to gain access to new features Apple doesn't provide.

So, when BusinessWeek, the news magazine that scooped the world last October that an iPhone SDK was truly on the way (a day before Steve Jobs made the official announcement) says that the SDK may well be delayed, we feel they have a little more cred than some of the iPhone rumour sites on the issue, cred that will go up, or down, depending on what actually happens.  

Arik Hesseldahl wrote for BusinessWeek that he’s “hearing from one source that its going to be late”. Hesseldahl then says: “I’m not yet hearing any reasons why, and it’s sounding like the official release date could slide by anywhere from one to three weeks”.

As you would expect, Hesseldahl says “Apple had no comment”, but notes that there hasn’t yet been any announcement by Apple of an event next week to launch the SDK.

Apple could announce the press conference just a few hours (or less) before giving it and plenty of journalists would drop everything to go. They might be annoyed at the short notice, but they would still go.

Still, the situation appears to be ‘fluid’... and perhaps the real reason is also the impending launch of yet another new firmware version for the iPhone, be it 1.1.4, 1.2, 2.0 or something else. Please read onto page 2.