Thursday, March 6, 2008

iPhone SDK, epocrates for my Touch?

The iPhone SDK was announced. Personally, all I want Apple to do is to sell the iPhone unlocked, but alas, unlocking is specifically not allowed on the SDK. F U Apple, F U AT&T.

However, watching the streaming event, 1 thing caught my attention. Epocrates! Apple actually had the people from epocrates to demo an offline version of the app on the iPhone! Epocrates is an excellent free drug reference app for healthcare professionals. It started on the Palm OS (which is the only reason I'm still using a Palm). Currently it's available for other platforms too, including Windows Mobile and Blackberry. However, those platform requires a purchase of an expensive smartphone, and in the US, the business model of cellphone providers is backward in the stone ages (expensive plans, long contracts, locked phones, etc). Even worse, the PDA market is pretty much gone. Even Palm has not updated their models nor decreased their prices for years. My current Palm Tungsten is dying, but I don't want to buy another Palm just so I can use epocrates.

Now I have the iPod Touch. Currently the only way for iPhone/Touch users to "use" eporates is to access the web version, which requires wifi connectivity on the Touch. Having an offline version of epocrates for my Touch would be awesome.

The only yet another annoying crap that Apple did is to yet charge more $$ for Touch users to upgrade to the upcoming firmware. Steve Jobs' quote: "We account for the touch differently than we do for the iPhone so there will be a nominal charge for the touch." So WTF? Are they now going to charge money for every freaking firmware upgrade of the iPod Touch? Don't give me "it's a software pack, not firmware upgrade pack" crap. Shown on the first "Software pack," users that don't purchase that and only updated the Touch's firmware will not only get any of the apps, but none of the home screen and icon changing feature. Now they are yet again going to milk $$$ from current Touch users. Let's see how much is that nominal fee is.

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