Aaron, Adriana and I headed back to MacWorld for a few hours today and my primary focus was to check out the Mobile Apps Showcase. While I was chatting with the folks from QuickOffice, YouTube sensation Itsmemorphious came over to say Hi. It's always a thrill to meet readers/viewers of the site at a show, and it's a double thrill when one of those PhoneDog fans happens to be a blogger or vlogger themselves. Carlos knows his iPhone/iPod Touch cases and proved to be a super nice, infectiously energetic guy in person. So definitely hop over to his YouTube channel for his take on MacWorld.
Unless he cut out the video footage in which he says I'm better looking than iJustine. Honestly, he said it. On camera. That'd better make it into his MacWorld coverage ...
Anyway, the apps that caught my eye today included the aforementioned QuickOffice, Runmeter, and Farm Frenzy 2. In short, QuickOffice Connect is a full featured office suite for iPhone OS that offers local file storage and access to cloud-based documents including Google Docs. QuickOffice was also a MacWorld Best in Show winner. Runmeter looks to be a serious challenger to my GPS fitness app of choice, RunKeeper Pro. And Farm Frenzy 2 is a Tycoon-like game for the agriculture set. Look for reviews and/or videos on all three apps in the near future.
And then there was the iPhone Keyboard. This thing may or may not ever see the light of day, but it was on display in a non-functional, semi-finished prototype form at SKN's booth. SKN makes "Shortcut Skins" (keyboard overlays) for Apple keyboards, and they've also got a customized iPad keyboard dock on the way that promises to include an iPad app to allow users to program shortcuts to various buttons on the keyboard.
But perhaps more interesting was the iPhone keyboard, which is an Apple Bluetooth keyboard mated to a metal iPhone stand. The prototype and product renderings all showed overlay-style icons printed onto the keys, and an SKN rep told me that he actually buys keyboards direct from Apple and modifies them for resale as SKN products. He's basically hoping that iPhone OS 3.2 will open up iPhone to pairing with hardware keyboards since it will do so for iPad with the forthcoming Apple iPad Keyboard Dock.
In other words, the iPhone Keyboard might happen. Or it might not. It's kinda up to Apple. If it does happen, it won't be cheap - we're looking at a price point of around $179 for the wireless keyboard/stand.
