There are certain levels to being an Apple fan. This morning (extremely early this morning) I levelled up as for the first time I stayed up for my first ever live Apple Keynote.
The keynote in question was the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) and it kicked off at 3am Melbourne time. I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a live audio feed from someone in the audience so I could hear his Royal Steveness in the flesh, live and in full.
I’m typing this after 2 hours sleep and yes I did dream about the iPhone (*level up*) and yes the internet tubes will be clogged full of Apple and iPhone news but I thought seeing that I’ve already done the hard yards I might as well talk about it.
So in no particular order please find below the items from the Keynote that were of interest to myself:
OSX – Snow Leopard
Only briefly mentioned by Steve but the next version of OSX will be called Snow Leopard.
iPhone 2.0, SDK and 3rd Party Applications
While the new iPhone 3G stole most of the limelight there is great news for users of the original iPhone in the form of software update 2.0. Bringing with it a lot of functionality and enhancements such as better contact e-mail management, contact search, e-mail attachment support, push services from Microsoft Exchange and MobileMe (more on this below) and 3rd Party Applications. Support for Pages, Numbers, Keynote and also Microsoft Office will be supported so no more making half-assed notes in Notes! Your existing iPhone will feel brand new again when 2.0 lands in the near future.
While we knew 3rd Party Applications were coming to the iPhone and the SDK had been freely available for a while now it was great to see what developers have in the pipeline for the iPhone and also how apparantly simple it is to develop for the iPhone. Apple also addressed the issue/question of how do you have an application that is not actually running in the background still provide the function expected ie a MSN client or Twitter Application? Apple will provide a central push server to push alerts to your iPhone notifying you of any updates to your application. Very clever way of ensuring that applications don’t stay open in the background taking up valuable resources.
All of these 3rd Party Applications will also be distributed via the Apple Application Store making for a very easy way to install and manage applications for the iPhone.
MobileMe
Replacing Apple’s rather long in the tooth and expensive .Mac service MobileMe is a complete revamp with much needed added features to justify the $119.00 yearly subscription fee. At the core of MobileMe is again push technology where all of your e-mail, contacts, calendars even photos are synchonized in real time between your iPhone, Mac, PC and the web. This brings what would normally be an enterprise level feature to the masses and also cementing itself as a ‘must have’ addition to the iPhone. All of the existing features of .Mac are there like iDisk and iWeb with online storage increased to 20Gb making it very good value.
iPhone 3G
Everyone knew it was coming and well if Apple didn’t announce it there would be geeks rioting in the streets so it was with no great surprise that Steve took the wraps off the iPhone 3G.
Looking very much like the existing iPhone aside from some small cosmetic changes, flush headphone jack (thank lord), plastic black or white rear shell (one assumes this is to improve antenna reception) and a few millimeters added and removed here and there the iPhone is still the best looking handset on the market.
Sporting 3G which improves data speeds 2.8 times faster than EDGE and allowing both simultanious voice and data connections this was the feature that everyone had wanted from the original iPhone allowing the user to really take advantage of the iPhone’s full potential.
GPS has also been added to add yet another layer of functionallity to Google Maps and also for applications like geotagging photographs etc…
The kicker to all of this is that Apple have dropped the price of the iPhone 3G to US$199.00. Compare that to the US$599.00 launch price of the original iPhone just one year ago and you know Apple is aiming for world domination just like it did with the iPod.
The iPhone will be launched on July 11 and this includes Australia where I have already placed a deposit to secure one of these bad boys at launch.
Anyway I could go on forever but I am exhausted and need to go attach an IV of coffee to my arm so discuss away in the comments and check out apple.com.au for all the official details.
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