This is what happens when you drop your iPhone on the floor wihhout a case!

I don’t recommend it to anyone!!  This devastating event occurred on Thursday and we are getting ready to go to the “National Charter School Show” in Washington DC this weekend. I needed to have my iPhone in order to demo our iPhone/iPod Touch software; the cracked screen of my iPhone would not have made for a good demo.

This morning I got up at 4:45am on a mission, and went down to the mall near my house, and I was number 1 in line to get the brand new iPhone 3Gs. It just so happened it was released today.

First in line for the iPhone 3Gs

There were two lines that were forming. One line if you pre-ordered your iPhone online and the second line for those who did not have a pre-order.  When they finally opened the door to the mall, there were two guys already in line, imagine that, they snuck in a locked entrance.   That was ok, since I was still number 3 in line it did not bother me much.   There were 5 of us in the “didn’t have a pre-order” line at 7:00am (when they opened the doors) and about 100+ people waiting in line for the pre-order phones.  I was in and out of the Apple Store in 15 minutes while those poor people that already purchased the phone had to wait for up to 2 hours to get theirs.   Apple did better on this release than when the iPhone 3G was released but obviously their system is still flawed!

When I got back to my office at 7:30 this morning, I opened the box, synced the phone and immediately started playing with it. The new  iPhone 3Gs is VERY fast. Our new App Store title, Academic Fitness Daily Trainer, is going to run very well on this new device.

Have you dropped or broken your iPhone? Did you pre-order one and have to wait in a longer line than those who didn’t? Did you luck out like me? Share your thoughts!

Apple today, released version 3.0 of their iPhone and iPod touch Operating System. This highly anticipated release includes many updates and upgrades that make these devices even better.

The new features include:

- Cut, Copy and Paste

- Landscape View for Mail, Notes and Messages

- Landscape Keyboard for Mail, Notes, and Messages

- Support for Multimedia Messages (MMS) which will be available to  ATT customers later this summer. The date is still TBD.

- Find My Phone feature which locates a missing or stolen iPhone. This feature is integrated in MobileMe.

- Remote Wipe is now an option in MobileMe to protect your data in case the phone winds up lost or stolen.

- Turn by Turn GPS-based directions

- A new Voice Memo app has been added

- Spotlight search for contacts, emails, and media content stored on the iPhone

What does this mean for education?

As we all have either seen or heard about, the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch are phenomenal devices to extend learning on-the-go. In this age of technology, we need to embrace and utilize the tools which make teaching engaging and effective. With the latest tools available to developers, applications that run on these devices do more and make more things possible than ever conceived before. Innovative Knowledge is hard at work developing and testing the next-generation of it’s mobile learning suite and should be on the App Store by the start of the new school year.

Academic Fitness Daily Trainer is an application, set to be released on the new iPhone/iPod Touch 3.0 platform, that will provide students with review questions that tests their knowledge and ensures they are ready for tests, quizzes, and overall school success. The material is presented in an interesting and engaging way and has pictures that accompany each question in order to assist students.

Here is a sneak peek of the application: