New apps for the iPhone

>> Hi, I'm Kent German, senior editor at CNET dot com. It's January 15 and I'm here at Mac World 2008 in San Francisco. I want to tell you about a few updates to iPhone that were announced today. There is no 3G iPhone, but we will see that in 2008, it was not announced here today. We have seen a few software updates though, a few new features, and a few additions so I want to go over those with you. One of the most basic but one of the most interesting I think, that was announced today, was that you can now send text messages to multiple people. So that means you can write one text messages and then click on 5 people or whatever, and send it to them. So that's a great addition. We didn't have that before; it's something really simple that the iPhone really should have had from the start so looking forward to that. Also one thing that was announced was location based services. You remember in the firemen they do have Google maps, but there is no GPS set up so while you can definitely tell where you can look at surrounding place, where a city, you can zoom in, you can't actually tell where you are but announced today is a location based feature. Now it's not GPS, there still is no GPS chip in the phone, but it actually locates you through cell towers and wifi hotspots. So of course that will mean that you need to be near a cell tower or wifi hotspot. This is a little strange I would rather have a full GPS capability. Of course that would mean that actually putting chips in the phones so you would have to go get a new one. So you can get that capability now but just remember you'll need to be near a wifi hotspot or a cell tower. So if you're out in the middle of nowhere where GPS is actually really useful, that's gonna be a problem. Other things that were announced is you can actually have web clips and what that means is you can actually clip a website then put it actually on your main menu so you can go forth and if you like the new times or whatever it might be you click on that, and you can open the page in some ways so not for going to the browser anymore. Other things that we have, we have lyrics; we have a lyric overlay, iTunes so you can see lyrics for a song. And the last major thing we've heard about was customizable home screen. So what that means is you can take the icons, you can move them around, you can actually add icons from the bottom here, you can move them up to the top or move icons down. And there is even a second page, so if you have multiple icons you can actually find a second page of the menu. So all of these features will be available today, that's January 15, 2008. It's a free update which is great. There are some updates to the iTouch which cost you 20 dollars so, this is a free update and they're all available today. So definitely hook up your iPhone to iTunes and check out the new things. I'm Kent German, senior editor at CNET dot com, we're here at Mac World 2008 in San Francisco. [ music ]