As expected, Apple showed off iOS 6 at this year's WWDC, months ahead of its Fall release (presumably at the same time as the new iPhone's announcement). Prodigy and I followed the liveblogs and tweets, giddy at the new features Apple is preparing to cram into the iPhone and the iPad.
Turn-by-turn navigation for the Maps app, which now runs on a custom database Apple made itself. There's even a Flyover Mode for easier driving. Yay!
Facebook integration. That's nice!
Facetime over cellular—that feature finally has a purpose!
Oh, and Siri's coming over to the iPad—yay for me and Plato, my recently bought iPad 2!
Or so we thought.
The turn-by-turn navigation on iOS 6? iPhone 4S only. Prodigy will get the fancy new vector-based Maps app, but neither turn-by-turn nor Flyover Mode.
The Facetime over cellular feature is restricted to the iPhone 4S and the latest-generation iPad. We don't know why, because Nokia had this working on much less powerful phones when I was in high school, but the fact is that I still can't make Facetime calls home over my cell network with Prodigy.
And Siri is coming to the iPad—the third-generation iPad, that is. The original iPad and the iPad 2 still won't have her (and not even Voice Control!).
Of course, this is all a portent of the already obvious: that a new iPhone is coming out in the Fall, and it's going to support all of these features, maybe even along with some other unannounced hardware-related ones. The unspoken rule of Apple is that only the two latest iPhone models (in iOS 6's case, the iPhone 4S and the new iPhone to be announced in September) get to carry the full feature set.
In other words, this is all part of the Grand Apple Plan, and has been from the very beginning. Prodigy and I were expecting it, but it still feels weird to be getting old.
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