Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off this morning in San Francisco and ReadWriteWeb is at Moscone West to cover the keynote scheduled to begin at 10am PDT; you can check the current time here.
9:30 am: The crowds are lining up outside and there's lots of speculation about what might be announced. Will Steve Jobs appear? Will they show an Apple tablet? Will the Snow Leopard OS be made available? Will there be a new iphone? Will the old iphone (3G) become the cheap iphone ($99) - or will a new cheap one put in an appearance? Read on for our coverage below.
]]> Note: Original reporting from the keynote by Lidija Davis, editorial support provided by Frederic Lardinois.
MacBook Updates
10:00am: Here we go: starting out with a prerecorded PC guy Apple commercial introducing the keynote. "Hello I'm a Mac, and PC is trying to say have a great conference."
10:01am: Schiller on stage now. Starting out with OSX: active users now up to 75 million. 2002-2007, only 25 million.
10:05am: Brand new version of 15inch MacBook Pro. Has Built-in lithium polymer battery with two hours of extra battery live.
Seven hours of battery life - 40% more than last battery. Battery will accept more than 1000 recharges.
New display: more vivid colors. New SD card slot.
10:09am: new MacBook Pro will have up to 3.06 GHz dual core processor, up to 8GB of memory.
Price now lower at $1699 for 2.53 GHz model. 250GB hard drive, NVidia 9400M graphics. SSD options. High-end model will have 500GB hard drive, 9600M graphics.
10:11am: New: 13inch MacBook Pro: will get the same new battery. "Just as thin, just as light." Will also get SD card slot, backlit keyboard. $1199. Available today.
Prices: 13inch: $1199; 15inch $1699; 17inch $2499.
10:16am: Schiller: "world's greenest lineup on notebooks." All meet epeat gold standard.
Snow Leopard
10:17am: Talking Leopard now: "most successful release."
Talking Vista: no user should have to worry about viruses, registry, dll, disk fragmentation.
Apple: "We come from such a different place."
10:19am:Talking about Snow Leopard: three things - refinements, powerful new technologies, exchange.
Expose is now build into the dock.
Installation a lot faster (over 45%) - after install, Snow Leopard also recovers more disk space (over 6GB).
Preview now 2x faster, too - "using a little bit of AI."
Mail: 2.3x faster.
10:24am: Safari 4: final version released today.
Safari 4: 7.8x faster JavaScript performance than IE8. Built-in "crash resistance."
10:28am: New interface for Quicktime player: chrome-less.
10:29am: Craig Federighi VP Mac OS engineering about to talk.
Snow Leopard Demo: new features: magnify thumbnails, work within a window without closing Expose.
Brings up NYTimes with a huge Bing ad on it.
10:32am: Showing off Safari 4: fast - Google Maps, ESPN render immediately (nothing new there is you have used the beta versions, by the way).
10:34am: Quicktime X: reengineered from ground up. Playback controls overlayed on video - move mouse out of the window, controls disappear. Upload clips directly to YouTube, MobileMe, or iTunes.
10:36am: Bertrand on stage again: talking about foundation technologies in Snow Leopard.
Applications running in 32bit mode have inherent limit of address space. 64bit mode allows appls to use large amounts of RAM and do some calculations 2x faster. How to make best use of this?
Multi-threaded programming is fairly inefficient - introduces a new methodology called Grand Central Dispatch/
10:39am: language extension, multi-core engine, object oriented framework, intergration with all system APIs and tools.
10:41: New: OpenCL - going beyond OpenGL. "GPUs now have 1 teraflop power." Apple wants to use this for powering more than just graphics. All top GPU manufacturers are participating.
10:43: Built-in Exchange support. Integration between exchange and personal email - drag and drop support with iCal.
Accept event invitations right through Mail.
Snow Leopard Upgrade: $29
10:45am: Price for Snow Leopard: $29. Family pack: $49. Audience going crazy!
Available in September. Final developer preview version today.
iPhone
10:48am: Scott Forstall takes the stage.
Stats: SDK downloaded 1 million times, 50k apps in App Store, 40 million iPhones and iPod touches (Apple calls them iPhone OS devices) sold. Crossed 1 billion app downloads on April 23rd.
10:49am: Thanking developers and customer. Playing video of developers talking about their experience with iPhone development.
10:55am: Video has ended - we'll post it later.
iPhone OS 3.0
10:56am: 100 new features: copy and past, landscape mode for more apps, MMS (one app to send text and multimedia), spotlight search for content of entire phone (contacts, email, etc.)
29 carriers will support launch.
Rent and purchase videos right from phone
10:59am: iTunes: Rent and purchase videos right from phone (also TV, music, audio books).
Better parental controls.
Tethering
Tethering (yay!): share connection with computer - will work over USB and Bluetooth. Requires carrier support (who will surely charge for this!)
Safari
11:02am: runs JavaScript 3x faster on iPhone OS 3.0; HTML5 support now with support for HTML5 audio and video tags.
Languages: switch to other languages in realtime. 30 more languages in iPhone OS 3.0 (including Greek, Thai, Hebrew, Arabic) 11:05am: Find My iPhone - available to MobileMe customers only - log in, and a map will tell you where your phone is. You can then also send a message to you phone - in demo, a waiter calls you back (thief is probably less likely to do that...).
You can also send a remote wipe command to your phone. Once you find the phone again, you can restore it from a backup (already available for enterprise customers).
11:09am: Support for peer to peer. Wirelessly over Bluetooth - finds partner playing a game, for example, and automatically connects them.
Better support for maps in apps (note: developers have been telling us that this is one of the features they have really been looking forward to).
Push Notifications
11:12am: Generic service for developers: Push things like sports scores, instant messages.
Notifications will come in the form of pop-up alerts, sounds, App icon badges.
A lot of Demos
11:14am: Demo time: Brings up number of developers to show off features of iPhone OS 3.
First up - Gameloft: Shows off ability to play your own music while playing game (Asphalt 5 - developer calls it "best racing game on the iPhone" - wouldn't expect them to call it anything less).
Next: Airstrip: lets doctors monitor patient medical data from their phones. Already cleared by the FDA. Supports push and sends out alerts when a parameter goes out of control. See patients vitals from anywhere.
11:19am: Next demo: ScrollMotion. Will bring 170 daily newspapers to the iPhone. Also: 1 million books and magazines. Uses new iPhone 3.0 features to do in-app purchases.
Shows ability to copy and paste part of book and email it or use it in other apps.
Also bringing lots of textbooks to the iPhone (you can find out thoughts about textbooks on the Kindle here).
11:24am: Next demo: TomTom - this is a big one: turn-by-turn directions, including text-to-speech. Delivers full GPS experience on the iPhone. Will also sell accessories. Availability: later this summer.
As always - these demos tend to go on for a bit too long.
11:26am: Next demo: ngmoco :)
Showing off in-game purchases of new levels in the game and head-to-head play (Star Defense - launching today - iPhone 3.0 features whenever it launches (no date for that yet, but we expect to hear more in the next few minutes...)).
11:30am: and another demo - this time, it's Pasco, showing a science app that can hook up to sensors (new ability of iPhone OS 3.0 to work better with third-party hardware devices.)
11:32am: You thought that was the last demo and they would move on to the iPhone hardware? Nope. Next up, Zipcar (car sharing). Uses iPhone OS 3.0 MapKit to embed Google maps. Unlock your car from the phone.
11:37am: Last demo! Line 6 and Planet Waves. Control your guitar amp from your iPhone. Demo not going so well... communication between phone and guitar isn't working.
11:41am: Line 6 demo canceled... "go to our site to hear what it looks like."
Release date for iPhone OS 3.0: June 17th
11:44am: Last developer seed out today - asking devs to retest all of their apps to be ready for the release.
Schiller coming back on stage.
iPhone Hardware
11:45am: Schiller: iPhone makes up 65% of mobile web usage.
Reviews stats again: 50k apps. Only 4.9k for Android, 1,088 for Nokia.
New iPhone: iPhone 3GS
]]>11:46am: S stands for Speed: much faster. 2.1x faster to lead messages, SimCity loads 2.4x faster, large websites 2.9x faster.
Supports OpenGL, 7.2Mbps HSPDA
New Camera - Video
New camera: 3MP with auto-focus (tap to focus); better in low-light situations. Auto-macro up to 10cm.
Video! 30 frames per second, VGA with auto-focus, automatic white balance, auto-exposure.
Videos can be shared immediately on YouTube, MobileMe, MMS, and by email.
Dev's will get an API to play with video in their apps as well.
Voice Control
Next: voice control - say: "Call Scott Forstall" - the phone will make the call. Also: control iTunes ("think" what's playing now" or "play more songs like this").
More new features
11:55am: Compass (integrated with maps), support for Nike+, new accessibility features (VoiceOver for content, controls, etc.). (note: wonder if this needs the extra speed of the 3GS to work, or if this will be available for all iPhones with OS 3.0).
For businesses: data encryption, instant remote wipe, encrypted backups.
Battery life
11:58am: 9 hrs of Internet surfing, 10 hrs of video, 30 hrs of audio, 5hrs 3G talk-time, 12 hrs 2G (as always, we take these numbers with a grain of salt.
Prices/Release Date
Price: $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB in black and white (prices are for new customers).
Old iPhone 3G now for $99.
Release date: June 19 in US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Switzerland, UK. 6 more countries a week later.
12:02pm: Showing new ad.
12:04pm: Schiller sums up today's announcements, thanks employees.
And... that's it. No "one more thing," no Steve.
Thanks for reading everybody!
