It's coming in bits and pieces - the story is falling into place. The pundits, jockeys and tech gurus are all thinking they have the square around this, but leave it to Jobs and Apple to have something up the sleeve of inventiveness.

We have stated it here before in other words and again now - Apple will blow away most people with what they will end up delivering.

So ... patents. Patents are nearly always a bit vague and open ended in order to allow for wiggle room and to protect things still under development. When an application for a patent is filed it become public knowledge and as such often the diagrams and descriptions are fuzzy, simple or confusing as all get-out.

In the case of a recent patent application it becomes clear they will likely add download ability via iTunes as most of us have expected. What will they offer? Firmware updates, ringtones, wallpapers and of course music, videos and TV.

It is this person's belief you will also see games and widgets, widgets, widgets.

Labels: games, iPhone, iTunes, patent, widgets

We have heard and seen about Google Maps on the iPhone, about the phone software, about Yahoo push email, stock and weather widgets and the SMS TXTing ability on the iPhone.

What we have not been shown is the calendaring application, Notes and the camera. In an earlier blog post I brought up the liklihood that software for the iPhone would not remain an Apple-only thing forever.

Calendars are not that exciting, there isn't too much you can do with Notes. I expect the photo software to use some of the whiz-bang multi-touch capabilities we have been shown. But what else will there be? The answer may well be in the OS X Dashboard - widgets.

There is a huge value to these small pieces of code and I think the usefulness and ingenuity of the userbase should allow the iPhone to run some pretty spectacular things.

The list of widgets available grows all the time and many of these are easily adaptable to a mobile environment. I can imagine check server status on the iPhone through use of a widget or using a widget to track my packages without having to use the Safari browser to go to UPS.

The golden egg is truly the small snippets of functionality that extend the device. I can't see Apple ignoring this ability.

Labels: Applications, Dashboard, iPhone, widgets