Coverage of Steve Job’s Keynote address at WWDC 2008: New 3G iPhone is now Official, rollout on July 11

BY Jason

Published 9 Jun 2008

Apple’s much awaited WWDC event is underway where we have all speculated that Steve Jobs will be launching the next generation iPhone aka 3G iPhone during his Keynote address.

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2008 is being held at Moscone West, San Francisco.

We have the who’s who of the tech world attending the conference which includes Mike Arrington and Matt Hickey from Techcrunch, Ryan and Jesse from Engadget, Brian Lam and Jason Chen from Gizmodo and Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal.

Since I am not one of the lucky ones to be invited I am getting you the news from Gizmodo, Engadget and TechCrunch who are live blogging the event. So many thanks to them in advance.

So dear readers if you are looking for all iPhone related news from WWDC 08 then hit the jump.


iPhone 2.0 photos

Note: Updates are being posted from bottom to top (top newest).

That’s all folks, let the comments begin 🙂 let us know what you think about the new 3G iPhone which is finally official after months of speculations and rumors.

Frankly I am not blown away by the 3G iPhone as some of the images reminded me of the 3G iPhone photos that had been circulating around the blogosphere. It appears that the market are not too impressed either, as after a brief recovery the Apple stock is back at 179.23 down $6.41 (-3.45%).

The iPhone is now sleeker and faster with 3G with loads of new features and some great native iPhone applications. I would have personally loved to hear about a 32 GB model and the copy and paste feature which should have made it in the first model itself.

Steve Job then compared the 3G iPhone with Nokia N95 and Treo 750, it took Nokia N95 33 seconds to load while the Treo took 34 seconds to load the same page which had taken 3G iPhone 21 seconds (take that Nokia and Palm).

Steve Jobs also demoed the difference between the current iPhone and the new 3G iPhone. The current iPhone took 59 seconds to load the National Geographic website while the new 3G iPhone took only 21 secs and then went on to compare it with Wi-Fi which took 17 seconds to load (so a vast improvement over Edge and fast approaching Wi-Fi).

Apple is looking to rollout the 3G iPhone in 70 countries this year. They are going to start with 22 of the biggest,
rolling out the iPhone 3G at the same time in all of these countries on July 11.

So how much will the 3G iPhone cost? The 8GB iPhone will cost $199 and the 16GB will be $299 (that’s it?? What about a 32 GB model?).

The 3G iPhone will now also have a white model.

Steve says that Location services “is going to be a really big deal.” “It’s gonna
explode.” They get location data from cell towers, Wi-Fi and GPS.

Steve Job says “We’re doing this with great battery life.” The 3G iPhone’s standby is
300 hours. 2G talk time is up to 10 hours from 8 hours. 3G talk time is
5 hours. (Jobs says other phones have about 3 hours.) Browsing, 5-6
hours of 3G browsing. Video is 7 hours, and audio is 24 hours.

The new iPhone is thinner at the edges, has a full plastic back, solid metal
buttons, 3.5-inch display, camera, FLUSH HEADPHONE JACK, and improved
audio and Yes it has 3G and GPS.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you the 3G iPhone:


iPhone 2.0 photos


iPhone 2.0 photos

Thats when AppStore will also be available which will be available in 62 countries. It will automatically tell you when there is an update for the apps you have downloaded. You will be able to download your app if it is less than 10 mb or less otherwise you can download it over Wi-Fi or iTunes program via the computer.

Now for the big news. iPhone firmware 2.0 will be available in early July and will be free for iPhone owners and will cost iPod Touch owners $9.95.

Apple has added many languages including Asian languages. Japanese and Chinese has various input types and will also include character recognition which is rumored to have been bought from Chinese developer who had developed HwPen – a native Handwriting Recognition iPhone App.

You now also have Parental controls so you can filter YouTube, iTunes or even installing apps.

The new features are Contact search, iWork document support, bulk delete/move, saving images from an email to your photo library,
and a scientific calculator that’s activated by turning the phone into
landscape mode (nice touch).

Steve Jobs is back on stage to talk about the new features (finally).

I have been also watching the Apple Stock to see how the markets is taking the news from the Keynote address, so far they don’t seem to be impressed as Apple stock is at $177.84 down $7.80 (-4.20%).

Video of official Native iPhone Apps

MLB.com to bring app “At Bat” which shows
today’s games, stats, and even live game info like who’s on base etc etc.

Folks at MooCowMusic have developed the native iPhone application called Cow Terry that lets people make music on the iPhone. There’s piano, drums, and an automated blues app. We have already seen them develop unofficial iPhone application Drummer and had been quite impressed. So good luck to them!

Brian Greenstone from Pangaea Software who develop Mac games demoed two games for the iPhone: a physics-based puzzle game called Enigmo and Cromag Ralley, a 3D caveman racing game. Apparently they were able to port the games from OS X to the iPhone and get them up and running in 3 days (now that’s cool). Both these games will be on the App store at launch for $9.99.

Associated Press is making their own iPhone application which seems to be using iPhone’s location aware features to pull local news (so is GPS coming to the iPhone??).

The following native iPhone applications have been demoed: SEGA’s Super Monkey Ball, eBay’s Auction, Loopt and blogging software Typepad.

They are talking about the native iPhone applications that have been developed for the iPhone, apparently 25000 developers had applied out of which 4000 developers were admitted to iPhone developer program.

He and Scott Forstall seem to be running through the stuff we had heard about iPhone’s SDK  and iPhone in Enterprise.

Steve started his Keynote address with “It’s going to be one of the best WWDCs ever.”

Other related posts:

Details of Apple’s new 3G iPhone

Video of Official Native iPhone Apps

Related links:

Gizmodo’s Live blogging

Engadget’s Coverage

TechCrunch’s Live Coverage

 

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