The latest rumors are we’ll see 3 or 4 new iPhone models with a new camera, a compass and a more affordable entry price. Will all this be true?…
Our CEO Dane Falkner has been there for you and was tweeting live on our Twitter account. his Twitter account :) … Read on to learn more as we update this post with news live from the WWDC.
Apple® will kick off its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 8 at 10:00 a.m. A team of Apple executives, led by Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the keynote. WWDC will offer in-depth sessions on both iPhone™ OS 3.0, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, and Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™, an even more powerful and refined version of the world’s best desktop operating system and the foundation for future Mac® innovation.
Live coverage, main topics of the conference:
All new macbooks are shipping today and all cost at least $200 less then before. New 15 macbook pro has an SD card slot. up to 3.06 Ghz and up to 8 GB ram. 500 GB hard disk. Price starts at $1699. Top end 15″ MacBook Pro is $2299 for 2.8 ghz 4gb ram 500gb drive. The 13″ Macbook Pro gets new display and battery for 7 hours of battery life, SD card slot plus it supports up to 8 GB of Ram, 500 GB HDD, firewire 800 [hey, welcome back firewire!]. Starts at $1199. Also the Macbook air gets updated and a big drop in price.
Snow leopard – (1) lots of refinements (2) powerful new technology (3) Exchange support. No changes to the Finder, but it’s been rewrote with lots of small benefits. New dock features to remove clutter. Snow leopard saves 6 GB of disk space over Mac OS X Leopard. Memory limit is now 16 Billion GB. 2x Math speed. All Snow Leopard apps will run in 64 bit. Snow Leopard using multi-core. Old way is to use threads. New method is Grand Central. Technologies are 64 bit, GCD, OpenCL. Snow Leopard has built in Exchange support in all basic apps: Mail, Address, iCal. Snow Leopard is available for all Intel based Macs at $129. Upgrade from Leopard is just $29.
Safari 4 is out of beta today for Windows, Tiger and Leopard. It is standards compliant on ACID3 (100/100 vs IE at 21/100). It has lots of new features. They might be cool for some, but they look mostly like eye candy only.
Quicktime X – modern foundation, hardware acceleration, colorsync support, http streaming. Will work with any web server. Changed UI of the QuickTime player. It has a visual timeline with smooth scrub. Mark in and out points. Share trimmed on youtube, email, or iphone. Very nice (it was about time!)…
The New Finder can magnify thumbnails and can play movies in the thumbnail or page through documents.
The New Dock. Each app in the dock has an expose feature. Hold the cursor over the icon and all windows will open for that app in expose style.
Live coverage, iPhone:
There are now more then 50.000 iPhone Native Apps in App Store running on over 40,000,000 iPod Touch and iPhones. 1 Billion apps were downloaded in 9 months. iPhone OS 3.0 has 100 new features. Here are a few: Cut, Copy and Paste. Shake to undo. Cocoa Touch support in API. Landscape on all Apple’s apps.
iTunes on the iPhone allows to rent or purchase movies, tv series, audio books and iTunes U contents directly from the device.
It finally is official: iPhone OS 3.0 supports “tethering”, in other words the device can now share its internet connection with your MacBook! Ok we spoke too soon… Tethering will be rolled out “Later” (crowd laughed at the non-commitment to a date).
More highlights of iPhone OS 3.0: (1) HTTP streaming audio and video, (2) Auto-fill forms, (3) HTML 5
iPhone Find Me feature will locate your phone on a map. Will also send a ping that is audible even when silent mode on. If iPhone is really lost or stolen you can send a remote wipe command.
iPhone peer to peer connectivity. Bluetooth without pairing.
iPhone Maps – can now embed locations in Google Map (hybrid and satellite). Can build in turn by turn feature, but there is some additional cost because you need your own map if you charge for your app.
Push notifications – text alerts, numerical badges, custom alert sounds.
A few amazing demos: Gameloft game, Airstrip technologies for medical applications with push notification of lab results, allow to look at realtime wave data from medical monitors on an iPhone and can scroll back in time to look for abnormalities. ScrollMotion: in-app book store, 1 million books, 50 major mags, 170 newspaper. Nice book reading. iPhone demo by TOMTOM. IQ routes. Best route based on time of day. Real turn by turn with audio. Car kit will dock the iPhone in a car. ngmoco:) demoes Star Defense. It is launching today at $5.95. Pasco demo: to teach kids about science. Very cool demo of sensors attached to balloon burst experiment, which eventually didn’t work. Last demo by Line6 and Planet Waves. Controls amp and guitar sound from an iPhone.
The new iPhone OS 3.0 is a paid upgrade of $9.95 and will be available on June 17 worldwide.
New iPhone 3G models are being announced.
New iPhone 3Gs. S is for speed. OpenGL ES version 2. 7.2 Mbps HSDPA. New camera 3 megapixel with autofocus. You can tap on an object on the screen to focus and do color balance. The new iPhone also captures video (30 fps VGA with audio). New voice control: hold the home button and voice control pops up with voice commands. Built-in digital compass: tap on the compass to go to the map. Tap again and map reorients. Built in support for Nike+. Built-in hardware encryption, improved battery life.
3G S price is $199… probably with a 2 years contract like before. iPhone 3G S $199 16gb, $299 32gb, iPhone 3G 8gb will be $99. Available on June 19.
Keynote is over.