WWDC wrap-up
There once was a time before everyone had the internet when you might go to an Apple event and be completely surprised by what was announced. These days, with several websites devoted to breaking Apple news first, that seems to happen less and less frequently. Whether it’s an iPhone-unlocker examining every line of code in the latest firmware or a fanatic studying every domain purchase made, chances are news will be leaked on the internet long before it is made official. Of course the same can be said of yesterday’s WWDC keynote.
The first hour or so of the keynote was devoted to, of all things, development (it’s the worldwide developer’s conference after all). With the hotly anticipated iPhone 2.0 update just around the corner which will include the application store, the development was all focused on iPhone applications. We saw Monkey Ball again, some other games, an Ebay application, medical application, so on and so forth. The thing you need to take away from this is that people are working on applications that you’ll be able to get your hands on next month. Nothing new in the development portion of the keynote except the 2.0 update has finally been given a date – July 11th. I was kind of bummed by this, I was really hoping if nothing else we’d see something tangible from today’s keynote, and I thought the update would be perfect for that. Still, at least we know for sure now when iPhone and iPod Touch users can start tricking out their portables with all sorts of touch applications.
After that, Phil Schiller took the stage to talk a little bit about a subject near and dear to my heart – MobileMe. You might recall that I put up a post talking about MobileMe last week and, aside from the price point issues, Apple did a lot of what I expected. They’ve branded MobileMe as "Microsoft Exchange for the rest of us," and its goal is to synchronize calendars, contacts and email across several devices including Windows PCs and the iPhone or iPod Touch. Pretty straightforward there and of course you get your usual web interface to access everything through – all of this will be located at the Me.com website in time. You can preorder MobileMe right now if you want, but the full package won’t be out until July 11th. As I said the price right now remains the same $99 a year. I was hoping for a price drop but if you’re getting a new mac you can get a $30 discount. Another nice thing is that the iDisk storage has been bumped from 10 gigabytes to 20, a significant increase. I still don’t think it quite rivals the Windows Live suite of services if only because of the price point, but it’s a definite step up.
Of course the darling of the show was the rumored 3G iPhone. It seemed like everyone was absolutely positive we’d see one, the only question was what sort of new functionality would be included to take advantage of the faster data transfers? Would there be new applications? Two cameras for video conferencing? GPS? Well as it turns out the answers to those questions would be No, No, and a surprising Yes. I never thought that Apple would be able to work GPS into the iPhone because the battery life would suffer quite a bit to have it. My assumption was reaffirmed when Steve Jobs said that the new 3G iPhone would boast 10 hours of talk-time over the previous generation’s 8. Surely there’s no way Apple could boost battery life and have GPS, right? Wrong. Almost right after discussing battery life Mr. Jobs went on to say that another of the most requested iPhone features, GPS, has been built into the 3G iPhone. The only question left is whether their battery estimates are with or without GPS enabled, I’m going to go ahead and assume without. Regardless, I was surprised and I expect to see some really cool location-based applications down the road for the iPhone.
There is, however, one more thing that most of the sites never guessed would happen. The new 3G iPhone received a pretty hefty price cut. The 8GB model went from $399 all the way down to $199. That’s huge! I don’t think anyone expected this. At first I was a little envious since I have my eyes out on an iPod Touch, so to see the brand-spanking new iPhone get a $200 price cut while I’m still looking at spending $399 for a 16GB iPod was kind of rough. Then I remembered that I won’t be paying for monthly data plans and my nerves were calmed. Not only that but the fine print has been reviewed meticulously and it turns out you can’t get this deal if you’re an existing iPhone user, the iPhone 3G is only available at $199 with a new 2-year contract. Sorry early adopters, it looks like you have been bitten yet again.
It should be noted that I watched a lot of the announcements via Leo Laporte’s coverage at TWiT Live and it totally brought me back to the TechTV days. He brought in a couple of guests and basically just did what everyone else was doing: watching news feeds from Engadget and MacRumors. He was also able to hook up some live audio streams from the conference and of course all along he and his guests were giving their commentary on the news. There was a lot of difficulty in trying to find a decent stream from the keynote as Apple doesn’t provide live video themselves. Therefore the only things available were Ustream and Yahoo! Live streams of amateur-shot video that ended up being garbled most of the time and struggled to stay live as each of the respective services tumbled under the weight of a few thousand users. Even Leo’s Stickam feed went down for a short period of time. Looks like these video streaming services aren’t quite there yet, are they? Or maybe Apple should just do the right thing and provide some live streaming video of future events. =P
If you’d like to watch the keynote address now you can see the quicktime version on Apple’s site: http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/0806wdt546x/event/index.html
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