Mark Cain felt like a rock star. The chief technology officer of medical imaging software company MIMvista got that sensation as he stepped onto the stage at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9 to demonstrate a new program that delivers medical scans to an iPhone. Suddenly he was in front of an auditorium packed with thousands of Apple faithful, reporters, and bloggers, all eager for news of the latest iteration of Apple's music-playing cell phone and the software applications designed to run on it. "We went from thousands of people knowing about our company to millions, in just a moment," he says.
MIMvista's application is just one of the 4,000 applications being developed specifically to run on the iPhone. These are part of a wave of so-called native applications, meaning they're designed to run directly on the phone, as opposed to being downloaded onto the phone from a Web browser. The first of these programs becomes available by mid-July, around the time the new iPhone 3G hits store shelves.
Native applications take full advantage of the new device's improved computational power, including its navigational features and ability to run on a more advanced wireless network. "[Both] Web-based and native applications have a place," says Erica Sadun of the Unofficial Apple Weblog. Yet, "native applications access location, and do a lot of things using the onboard sensors."
Apple has packed plenty into the new gadget. Like the first version of the iPhone, this one boasts a 2-megapixel camera, a snazzy touchscreen, and an accelerometer that helps it respond to motion. The fancy features make this "a truly sexy device," says Kevin Burden, director of mobile devices at ABI Research.
Business Class
As appealing as it may be to hipsters, the iPhone 3G was designed with business users in mind as well. Software developers are all...

More... (http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=60528)