iPhone 3.0 software spells new possibilities for games

Apple unveiled the iPhone 3.0 software tonight, and there was plenty to chew over from the point of view of iPhone gamers, with new features highly relevant to games.

They included in-game micropayments, push notifications, voice chat in multiplayer games, and support for custom hardware accessories, among others.

The micropayments is particularly interesting. During the launch, EA's The Sims 3 and ngmoco's LiveFire were both demonstrated using it.

In the former, you can buy items for your Sims for $0.99 a pop, while the latter - a newly-announced first-person shooter - you can buy extra weapons to blast your friends away.

LiveFire was the most innovative game shown, actually, since it also allows in-game voice chat when deathmatching over the network, as well as push notifications to invite friends to play even if they don't have the game open.

Push notifications will also be significant for the growing number of social games on iPhone, like iMob Online, Anytime Pool and Who Has The Biggest Brain? It brings to iPhone the kind of notification features already seen on Facebook.

Meanwhile, games can now access your music library on the iPhone itself, which gives plenty of scope for innovative music games.

As will the ability of accessory makers to launch custom apps - a Guitar Hero with peripheral is now theoretically possible. We also think this means a Zeemote for iPhone is now doable, although we'll try to confirm this.

Among the stats revealed during the event were that Apple has sold 30 million iPhones and iPod touches - that's 17 million iPhones and 13 million touches - and that 800 million apps have now been downloaded from the App Store.

Two million of those were from Gameloft, apparently. Meanwhile, 800,000 developers have downloaded the iPhone SDK.

Apple also addressed accusations that it's been over-heavy on the censorship front, revealing that 96 per cent of submitted apps were approved in the last month, and the vast majority of those within seven days.

So when can you get it? Well, a developer beta is available tonight, but the iPhone 3.0 software won't be available to us consumers until summer.

It'll work on all generations of iPhone and iPod touch, although users of the latter will have to pay for the upgrade.

Other features announced during the event were MMS, cut'n'paste, stereo Bluetooth, shared calendars and a whizzy new Spotlight search function.

For the whole story as it went down (with jokes), check our liveblog.