WWDC08 Keynote Wrap-up

by Eric March on June 9, 2008 at 3:06 pm

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or have just emerged from a six month cryostasis session, then you know what today is, and you know what this is about, so I’m not going to bore you with a rambling monologue and just get straight to the point. Which is convenient, because that’s where Steve started the morning off. You may find some of this vaguely familiar…

He started off the iPhone segment talking about the enterprise features, which we all pretty much knew about. 35% of the Fortune 500 participated in their enterprise beta program, showed a video of various corporate bigwigs and army types testing it out, talking about their experiences with it, blah, blah, blah. You all know plenty about this by now, and it’s pretty much a given that they were pretty taken with it.

Scott Forstall then took the stage to talk about the SDK, going over the same things we went over two and a half months ago — working with the various APIs, the commonalities between OS X Mac and OS X iPhone, etc. Jason Chen then came on stage to spin some code demos to show how easy it is to create an app. This is a developer conference after all, though, so you kind of expect some rehash of last March.

Next up, Sega’s Ethan Einhorn took the stage to talk about Super Monkey Ball again. Did I mention there was going to be some dêja-vú involved here? Because you may experience some dêja-vú. This time though they’ve really built out the game. They’ve crammed in 110 stages, fleshed out the UI and gameplay, and made it look pretty excellent. They say it will be available through the App Store for a sawbuck. Hey, $10 ain’t half bad for a commercial title.

And now for something completely different: Ken Sun of eBay takes the stage to show off their native iPhone auction application which appears to be bearing the imaginative name of “Auction.” It looks pretty awesome, though, if you’re a frequent eBayer. This isn’t a web app for Safari, this is dedicated. Searching, bidding, browsing, watch lists, even a photo strip to let you browse auction pictures — it’s all there and formatted perfectly for the iPhone. Being a frequent eBayer myself, this is definitely of interest to me. No pricing listed, but I suspect this is going to be a freebie.

Continuing with new and interesting dev demos, Sam Altman steps up to demo Loopt, a location-based Twitter-esque social networking app that will be released as a freeibe through the App Store. Nothing too interesting to see here, so let’s move along.

TypePad is demoed next. This is a blogging tool. Y’know … for bloggers. Who run a TypePad blog. Which is not us, so we don’t care. Apparently WordPess will be cranking out their own native blogging tool in a week or two however, and that will definitely be of significant interest to us here. But probably not for most of you, so moving right along…

Then we move on to newswire Associated Press’ Benjamin Mosse who demo their AP news feed app. Yawn. You get photos and video here though too, so maybe not a complete snoozefest.

Next: Pangea steps up an demos Enigmo and Cromag Rally. Now, I played Enigmo on the Dell Axim X50v back when this was one of its killer apps showcasing the Intel 2700G graphics accelerator, and it’s a really fun puzzler with dynamic 3D elements and stuff. The iPhone version looks pretty much the same, albeit in lower resolution. (The Axim version was VGA) Cromag Rally is a stone-aged Mario Kart-style racer, and looks pretty decent. Both of these will hit the App Store with $10 price tags. (I’m sensing a pattern here.)

Now here’s one that might hit close to home: Mark Terry, the genius behind MooCowMusic, has showed up! He’s demoing Band, which surprisingly is going to become an App Store app. No word on if he’s going to be charging for this, though. Still, cool to see someone whose brilliant apps we’ve been following for some time get some stage time at the WWDC.

Then he’s shuffled off for Jeremy Schoenherr demoing MLB.com’s “At Bat,” which is really only for the hardcore baseball fans who want to keep up on the day’s game stats, news, and footage from whatever games were playing. Meh.

Modality steps up to demo, uh … Modality … which is some educational software for budding med students who want a pocketable Anatomy 101 guide. Don’t expect it to turn you into Gregory House, though. That takes many years, an empathectomy, and a metric ton of Vicodin. They also go over MIMvista, which has something to do with medical imaging or something. I think. I’m sorry, my eyes have glazed over.

Whoa, now that’ll snap you out of your boredom. Xavier Carrillo Costa from Digital Legends is demoing a 3D game they ported in 4 days(!) and it looks stunning! No name was given, but it looks a bit like a portable version of Gods of War, or maybe Dungeon Siege. It’s still in development and will apparently be ready for a Septemberish release. Very nice…

Okay, dev demos are over. Scott returns to the stage and goes over something that’s … interesting. And a little weird. He’s talking about IM applications and how current solutions (running them in the background) just aren’t feasable for a number of reasons, so they’ve come up with a new idea: The Apple Push Notification Service. It is, after a fashion, kind of like a way for network applications (IM clients, E-Mail clients, etc.) that would normally run background stubs to periodically check for events to function without requiring background stubs. Instead, Apple will maintain a Push Notification Server where incoming events are routed to this server and forwarded to your device as a push event, which will then pop up on your device. Both notification events, text, even custom alerts can be passed along the server to the iPhone. It works over WiFi or data connection, which is pretty good. I can’t help but get a Big Brother vibe out of this though.

Alright, time for The Steve to take the stage back. Now he’s talking about some new features in the upcoming firmware, which include:

• Contact Search (yes!)
• Full iWork Document support(?), as well as Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.
• Bulk move/delete/save of images to your library (presumably from E-Mail or documents)
• Scientific calculator built-into the regular calc app that you get by turning the device into landscape mode (cool)
• Parental controls for music (we knew this already)
• Chinese handwriting support (we knew that too)
• It will be a free update to all iPhone users as always, but fortunately it won’t be as much of a sting for iPod Touch users, who will only have to fork out $10 this time around.

The Steve mentions that the App Store will be available in 62 countries, and applications under 10MB will be downloadable OTA via the cell network. Over 10MB and you’ll have to do it through WiFi or via your home computer’s iTunes store. Another interesting development (heh) here is that developers can register as distributors in a limited setting and be able to distribute their applications ad hoc around to other iPhones wirelessly. In the example given, a professor at a college or university could register 100 other iPhones under his program and then then transmit his app to one of those 100 registered iPhones. Kinda nifty.

Then it’s on to demos of MobileMe, the reincarnation of .Mac. But I’m not going to get into that because it’s time for the main course: The 3G iPhone! Let’s bullet-point this:

• It’s 3G HSDPA/UMTS — we all but knew this as gospel anyway.
• Built-in GPS, something we figured was coming from the latest firmware dissection. I’m really glad they’ve recognized the burgeoning location-based services market — but I figured they would.
• The shell is indeed a glossy black plastic.
• The phone is noticeably thicker — a good 2-3mm at least, and though it’s thinner at the edges, it bulges out around the back in a nice rounded configuration.
• Flush headphone jack! Thank you!
• Metal buttons
• Better battery life (larger battery?) stumping 300 hours standby, 10 hours 2G talk time, adn 5 hours 3G talk time, plus 7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio.
• Same display and touchscreen, no changes in size or composition.
• BOOM, HEAD SHOT PRICE CUT! $199 for the 8GB version, $299 for the 16GB version, and both will be available in black or white versions. THESE ARE NOT CARRIER-SUBSIDIZED PRICES! Can I get a Hell, Yeah?
• Available in 70 countries.
• Global rollout July 11th.

Wow. Just … wow. A lot of this we were expecting: Glossy black, thicker (not thinner, because as I said before, that would be silly given the added features.), the GPS, etc. I wasn’t expecting the metal buttons (nice), and was hoping for a flush headphone jack, but I was totally not expecting the $199 and $299 price points without carrier subsidies. That just gave me a great stonking woody.

But anyway, that wraps up the WWDC08 keynote! Now get your cash wads, credit cards and checkbooks out — and be prepared to start getting in line, say … about two weeks from now, because there are going to be floods of people buying these things.

Check out a selection of iPhone 2 shots from Gizmodo’s coverage below.

(Sources: Engadget, Gizmodo)

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Posted in Apple Event, Breaking News, Firmware Related, Hardware Related, SDK, iPhone OS 2.0