Monday, June 8, 2009
WWDC 2009 Keynote LIVE: iPhone 3Gs
Schiller announces iPhone 3Gs. S is for speed. “This is a really fast iPhone.” Loads apps and Web sites very, very quickly. NYTimes.com loads more than 3x as fast. Schiller says its about 2x faster than the iPhone 3G. As expected, the device features a brand new 3 megapixel autofocus camera. Auto-focus. Auto-white balance. Auto-exposure. Tap-to-focus. Improved low-light sensitivity. Auto-macro. “The best thing about this camera is it also captures video.” 30 FPS VGA with audio. Auto-focus, etc. Quick demo of video shows that quality is impressive. Videos are stored alongside pix in the picture application. Edit and share videos with the tap of a finger. “And if my carrier supports it, I can even send these things via MMS,” Schiller quips in a poke at AT&T.
Forstall returns to the stage for some final words about iPhone 3.0. Free for iPhone owners. $9.95 for iPod Touch owners. Available worldwide June 17. GM seed available to developers today. And with that he hands the keynote back over to Schiller. Schiller talks up the iPhone 3G, noting that two thirds of all mobile browsing is now done from iPhones and iPod Touches. He pulls up a graph of various app stores and the number of apps available at each. Apple’s App Store far exceeds them all. 
ngmoco:) is followed by Pasco, an education app. Using the app and an accessory to collect data on balloon pressure. Forestall joins demoer on stage in full “Mr. Science” get-up. “When you connect sensors to the iPhone, the whole world becomes a laboratory.”
Moving on to ngmoco:), which I believe also demoed at Apple’s iPhone 3.0 event. The company is showing off its newest game — Star Defense. It makes use of 3.0’s new in-app purchase feature. You can buy expansion packs from within the game itself. Game is launching today, but its 3.0 features won’t work until 3.0 goes live. 
Moving on now to in-app purchases, peer-to-peer support, accessories, and push notifications — things we heard about at Apple’s previous iPhone 3.0 event.
The AllThingsD team is live at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco today, bringing you a liveblog of the keynote that includes beautiful photos by our own Adam Tow. Here they are, live and in living color.
Oh, this looks promising: “Find My iPhone.” Cut to video clip from 30 Rock episode in which Liz loses her iPhone. “Find My iPhone” is a feature of MobileMe, apparently. Lose your phone and log in to Mobile Me and the service will locate your phone for you. It will also allow you to force the device to play an audio alert so someone can locate it. And if you can’t? Remote wipe. Nice. 
So what’s next? iPhone OS 3.0, obviously. Its new features: cut, copy and paste, which works across apps and undo support via shake. Also, Landscape view and keyboard for all main applications — mail, messages, etc. MMS support has been added as well. But it’s carrier-dependent. In the states, for example, AT&T won’t be supporting it until late summer (audience groans).
“We’ve decided to build Microsoft Exchange support into Snow Leopard,” says Serlet to much applause. A quick demo of this new feature shows set-up is extraordinarily easy. Corporate Exchange accounts are auto-discovered and searchable via Leopard technologies — regardless of whether a user has Microsoft Office installed on their local machine. iCal and Address Book offers integrated views of Exchange events and contacts and local events and contacts. The integration seems very slick and easy. It also supports Exchange’s location and availability features.
Moving on now to Safari 4, which is shipping from Apple today for Leopard, Tiger, AND Windows … Safari 4 offers unsurpassed speed for HTML and Javascript. It’s also Acid3 compliant. Safari 4 is 100 percent compliant as opposed to IE, which is 21 percent compliant. Safari 4 is also more crash-resistant and 40 percent faster than its predecessors.
Apple (AAPL) is also updating the MacBook air. Two new configurations starting at 1.8 GHZ. “Great hardware deservers great software,” says Schiller. And with that he welcomes Bertrand Serlet to the stage to talk about OS X. Serlet immediately begins talking smack about Vista and Windows 7. “No end user should ever have to know about disc defragmentation,” he quips. Windows 7 is “fundamentally another version of Vista. “It’s the same old technology. This is so very different from OS X.”
10:01, and lights dim to reveal a movie screen. Onscreen: John Hodgman, as PC, welcoming attendees to WWDC and encouraging developers to slow down iPhone App development. Increasingly frustrated Hodgman finally fires off a raspberry. Replaced by Mac guy, who welcomes everyone to WWDC. Phil Schiller takes the stage now. “Can’t you feel the love in this room.” 25 million active OS X users in the past two years, he says, talking up Leopard. Installed base has tripled in the past two years.
What does Apple have in store for its army of third-party Mac OS X and iPhone developers at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco today? Click through for a liveblog of the keynote and full coverage of the event, happening now.
Welcome news: Apple CEO Steve Jobs is nearly ready to return to work and is expected to be back at his desk by months end. This after nearly six months of medical leave taken to deal with a nasty hormonal imbalance problem. Could he make a cameo at WWDC Monday? Here’s hoping …
