... but I cannot justify the £450 or so a year that I would need to pay for a contract. I am talking about the iPhone, the interface of which is a thing of beauty, with its gesture control and plethora of applications that you can download for tuppence ha'penny, or even free. Zip. Nada.
I have always been a bit of a luddite when it comes to mobile phones. I have one, it is several years old, and it can handle texts, and phone calls. I don't use it for surfing the web, or sending MMS messages (it has no camera either). I haven't needed more functionality than that, and until the iPhone came along I couldn't imagine I would ever need more than it has. Of course, having seen the iPhone and its cool take on telephony, I now want one. Oh, how I do, I so do.
Every year at Wimbledon we try to implement something new, innovative, and exciting that helps extend the reach of the Championships. This year an application for the iPhone was an obvious choice. I talked to David Balcom, a Business Development Executive for Application Innovation at IBM, and he gave me a quick run down on the key points. The application was built using the standard development kit by a coder and an interface designer in Atlanta. It has a native iPhone look and feel which helps with the ease of use, trading on the familiarity that an iPhone user has with the way the phone presents things.
The cool features from the Wimbledon site available in the application are:
- Live scores available from all courts
- News
- Schedule of Play
- Draws
- On-demand video.
As of yesterday, July 1st 2009, the application had been downloaded over 625,000 times, which is pretty incredible. A little bit of code, and repurposing of content from the site makes for a compelling app it seems. Top work Atlanta! Here are some screenshots of various application features.
Now, question is, can you lend me £450? Anyone?
I have always been a bit of a luddite when it comes to mobile phones. I have one, it is several years old, and it can handle texts, and phone calls. I don't use it for surfing the web, or sending MMS messages (it has no camera either). I haven't needed more functionality than that, and until the iPhone came along I couldn't imagine I would ever need more than it has. Of course, having seen the iPhone and its cool take on telephony, I now want one. Oh, how I do, I so do.
Every year at Wimbledon we try to implement something new, innovative, and exciting that helps extend the reach of the Championships. This year an application for the iPhone was an obvious choice. I talked to David Balcom, a Business Development Executive for Application Innovation at IBM, and he gave me a quick run down on the key points. The application was built using the standard development kit by a coder and an interface designer in Atlanta. It has a native iPhone look and feel which helps with the ease of use, trading on the familiarity that an iPhone user has with the way the phone presents things.
The cool features from the Wimbledon site available in the application are:
- Live scores available from all courts
- News
- Schedule of Play
- Draws
- On-demand video.
As of yesterday, July 1st 2009, the application had been downloaded over 625,000 times, which is pretty incredible. A little bit of code, and repurposing of content from the site makes for a compelling app it seems. Top work Atlanta! Here are some screenshots of various application features.
Now, question is, can you lend me £450? Anyone?
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Clearly all the Wimbledon team should be provided by Apple with an Iphone for the work done, and helping to promote the little known device :) Of course guidelines prevent receipt of such goods. However I know someone who is happy to accept such trial versions of hardware :)
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