What is a iPhone SDK?

THE iPhone 2.0 makes me mad.

Not, mind you, at the iPhone itself, but mad at cell-phone manufacturers who have saddled us for years with interfaces that lure us into labyrinths of menus.

The buttons that are supposed to guide us through this maze do different things on every screen: a single button can mean "Back" on one screen, "Cancel" on another, "Exit" on a third.


The iPhone sdk has one button on its face. It always does the same thing: takes you to the top menu, where icons representing all functions of the phone -- music player, Internet browser and more -- are laid out in a clear manner. Wham, you're out of the labyrinth.
This makes me mad, because this isn't just the way it should be done, it's the way it always should have been done. This became clear to me as I set out to look at the iPhone along with two other top-of-the-line phones, the Nokia N95 and Helio's Ocean.

The Nokia N95 costs $750, even more than the iPhone, and is jam- packed with features like a high-resolution camera, radio receiver and satellite Global Positioning System receiver. There are 13 buttons on its face, and that's before you slide the screen out to reveal the keypad.

Two of the N95's buttons take you to a top menu. But each button takes you to a different top menu. The menus navigate differently. The first doesn't have all the options of the other, the second has all the options but hides some of them. How am I supposed to remember which menu has which option?
The apple iphone sdk phone, which combines an innovative touch-screen interface with the media-playing abilities of the iPod, is currently sold only in the United States.

In a video post, Hotz demonstrated an iPhone running on T- Mobile's network, the only major U.S. carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology. (Video link: youtube.com/watch?v=tvJ1RGlxe8Q)

The hack is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software, and missteps may result in the iPhone becoming useless, so it's unlikely to become a household procedure.

"But that's the simplest I could make them," Hotz said in a phone interview. The next step, he said, would be for someone to develop a way to unlock the phone using only software.