We are moving towards an integrated future. Microsoft just revealed Windows 8 which brings the Windows Phone 7 interface to your next Windows OS release and Google recently bought Motorola (lets say is in process of buying out Motorola.) While Apple still has a different approach and fundamentally remains different from Microsoft and Google, we can’t help but notice how others are trying to take the good things from Apple’s integrated approach.
Talking about integrated approach, Apple recently announced iMessage along with its iOS 5 announcement at WWDC. iOS 5 is due sometime soon and even before the 200 million+ iOS users get a unified messaging service, it seems Apple is hard at work trying to bring its desktop version OS X Lion under the iMessage fold.
Macrumors is reporting a couple of new properties found in iChat which signifies an attempt to capture ‘timedelivered’ and ‘timeread’ data from iChat. These are new for iChat and aren’t supported by any of the protocols used by iChat so far. However iMessage makes uses of these on iOS 5 and this gives a clear hint of Apple’s plan to get iMessage running on OS X Lion (btw remember the concept video of iMessage on Mac?) The announcement might well come along with the release of iPhone 5 and iOS 5 or perhaps a little later. But as of now, we know that Apple wants to remain ahead in the ‘integrated’ game.
iMessage is a big move to end Blackberries dominance with BBM. While in developed economies like US, Blackberry has faced tough competition from iOS and Android, back here in India teenagers love Blackberry messenger and BB sales are driven to a great extent by people wanting to connect using the messenger. Apple has upped the game by including all iPods and iPads under the fold of iMessage and we wait to see how iOS 5 impacts Blackberries growth in developing economies.