Steve Jobs is banking on a big opening weekend. And not just for Pixar’s Ratatouille. Much like a summer blockbuster, Apple has positioned the iPhone for a weekend debut--Friday, at 6:00pm. That’s just in time for buyers to filter out of work, pay checks in hand, and onto lines at their local AT&T or Apple stores.  With a whopping 19 million consumers reporting strong interest in the iPhone, according to m:metrics research, the iPhone is destined to be a big hit. But what’s going to keep it at number one? Two words: killer apps. So where are they?

 

Although Google Maps and YouTube were on board at launch, the possibility of true killer apps from third-party developers seemingly died with Jobs' announcement at the Worldwide Developers Conference that Apple would not release a proper iPhone SDK. Instead, developers would be able to "write...Web 2.0 apps that look exactly...like apps on the iPhone." For the uninitiated, Jobs was referring to Ajax, the versatile scripting language behind such popular Web applications as Google Mail and Facebook. But can Ajax really hold a candle to a proper SDK? 
 
Possibly, says Mark Donovan, vice president and senior analyst at m:metrics. "I think shifting the paradigm to the Web makes a lot of sense in some ways. Apple still has security over what goes into the iPhone, but at the same time they're simplifying development and facilitating a large community already familiar with these tools."
 
Indeed, many Web developers have already begun designing apps for the iPhone simply based on the device's specs-screen size, form factor, input method, and UI conventions. But will this initiative really help? The answer, according to Donovan, remains unclear. "The questions that I have are, 'will developers really have unhindered access to all of the iPhone's features, i.e., querying the user's contact database, calling Google Maps, etc.,' and, 'can EDGE handle the heavy lifting of large Ajax applications?' I guess we'll just have to wait and see," he said.
 
Then, of course, there's the other "one more thing" that Jobs announced at WWDC: Safari for Windows. Despite what it looks like, Safari on Windows was never about chipping away at Microsoft Internet Explorer's market share.  What it's really about is aligning a consistent Web experience on both the iPhone and Windows. Additionally, Windows Safari gives Web developers an easy tool for developing and testing their iPhone apps on a Windows box. Genius? Maybe. But that still doesn't guarantee us any killer apps. It does, however, give us a pretty good start. Here's a list of early efforts that could grow into killers with some time.