9 June 2008 @ 11:28WWDC 2008

Highlights of WWDC08 follow:

In 95 days, there have been over 250,000 downloads of the iPhone SDK. 25,000 people have applied to the pay developer program, but only 4,000 were accepted.

Steve Jobs talks about the Enterprise features of the iPhone. Exchange support — push email, calendars, contacts, auto-discovery, global address lookup, remote wipe, all this stuff built in. VPN services are compatible with Cisco VPN servers.

Scott Forstall talks about the iPhone SDK. The iPhone uses the same kernel as OS X which makes developing a lot easier. Cocoa Touch makes building a fullscreen touch interface a simple task. Forstall talks of how “Sega blew [them] away with what they accomplished in just two weeks with the first cut of Super Monkey Ball.”

Next is a eBay app demo.

Then Sam Altman demos Loopt which will be free at the App Store launch.

Michael Sippey demos TypePad for mobile blogging. TypePad features photoblogging which taps into the camera’s API.

Next up, Benjamin Mosse from Associated Press shows photos and video from their network and encourages users to send news from their iPhones.

Pangea Software demos a couple new games for the iPhone — Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally. Both games took only three days to port to the iPhone. Both games will be available for $9.99 each at the App Store launch.

Mark Terry from Moo Cow Music demos an app called Band, which sounds like a miniature version of GarageBand. Band will be available at teh App Store in a few weeks.

Next, Jeremy Schoenherr demos a Major League Baseball app which shows the latest scores and real-time video highlights after the play, not after the game.

Modality demo. Modality is a medical learning application. Another medical app gets demoed — MIMvista.

Digital Legends Entertainment demos the last application which takes advantage of the iPhone’s OpenGL and accelerometers.

Scott Forstall talks IM and solving the problem of getting notifications even while the app is not running. The solution — “push notifications”. Apple will maintain a persistent IP connection to the iPhone whereby 3rd party servers can push notifications and alerts to the iPhone. This improves both battery life and performance of the iPhone compared to running background tasks. The unified push service will be available in September over both cell network and WiFi, and will be seeded to developers in the next month.

Steve Jobs talks of more new iPhone features — contact search (similar to Spotlight), iWork document support. View iWork documents from pages, Numbers, Keynote all on your iPhone, oh and MS Office documents too.

Parental controls have been added to the iPhone.

Multiple forms of entry available for Japanese and Chinese languages — includes character drawing.

Devs set the price of apps and keep 70% of the revenues. If a dev chooses not to charge for their app, the dev pays no fees.

The App Store will be available in 62 different countries. 10MB or smaller apps can be downloaded via cell network, WiFi, or iTunes. Larger apps can be downloaded via WiFi or iTunes.

Enterprises can distributed apps to iPhones on their intranet via iTunes.

Phil Schiller gets up to talk about a new service called MobileMe. MobileMe is constantly syncing email, contacts, calenders wherever you are, so that everything is up-to-date. MobileMe works with Mail.app, iCal, Address Book, and Outlook.

Phil: “What’s really going to surprise people, we’ve built an incredible suite of web 2.0 apps using Ajax.”
Access to full-blown applications through the web — this at me.com. MobileMe web apps are compatible with Mac or PC. Information is synced in real-time from MobileMe web apps to the iPhone.

MobileMe replaces .Mac and is $99/year for 20GB of storage. There will be a free 60-day trial. Current .Mac users will be automatically upgraded to MobileMe.

The iPhone is almost 1 year old. The iPhone has 90% customer satisfaction.

Top three features needed to take the iPhone to the “next level”: 3G, Enterprise support, Affordability.

“Today we are introducing the iPhone 3G.”

“This is what it looks like. Black back! Thinner at the edges. Full plastic back, it’s really nice.”

“Solid metal buttons, the same gorgeous 3.5-inch display, camera”

“Flush headphone jack.”

“Improved audio, it’s really, really great… and it feels even better in your hand, if you can believe it.”

Standby time with 3G is 300 hours.

2G talk time is up from 8 hours to 10 hours. 3G talk time is 5 hours compared to 3 – 3.5 hours with other phones.

Battery life is greatly improved.

iPhone has built-in GPS.

iPhone has full Exchange support.

Within a few months, the iPhone will be distributed in 70 different countries.

The 8GB iPhone 3G is will be priced at $199. Wow!

The iPhone 3G 16GB model will sell for $299!

The iPhone 3G is available in black and white.

Click here to buy the new 3G iPhone

Click here to pre-order the MobileMe service
(buy a new Mac and save $30 on the first year of MobileMe service)
MobileMe is available in Single User license ($99) and Family Pack ($149).

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