WWDC ’08 Keynote: What Was Announced
This morning Steve Jobs gave his annual WWDC Opening Keynote. In this Keynote he announces new products and services from Apple, and even sometimes demonstrates those to us. Here is the full list of what he announced, including any relevant links to pages on Apple’s website. In case you want to watch the Keynote yourself, it is available on Apple’s QuickTime Page (I, technically, haven’t yet seen it). Here’s what was announced!:
The iPhone 3G was announced, starting at just $199.00 for the 8 GB model ($299.00 for 16 GB, available in both black and white). The iPhone wil be launched starting on July 11th in 22 of the biggest countries. This includes all of North, Central, and South America (15 countries); Europe (29 countries), and Asia/ Australia (8 countries). The iPhone is launching in 6 countries today, and they have a goal of 25 countries in the next several months. It contains a GPS unit, but also takes location data the way that the old iPhone does, and it can do tracking. Solid metal buttons. The 3G iPhone is 36% faster than the Nokia N95 and Treo 750 (also on 3G networks). Also, it has surfaced (since the keynote address) that you’ll only be able to activate your iPhone 3G from the Stores, not iTunes at home.
The iPod OS v2.0 firmware will be available in early July for just $9.95 for iPod Touch users (iPhone users get it free). The App Store will be available in 62 countries worldwide. Apps will update automatically using the App Store. The 2.0 firmware has an immense amount more languages that are supported. Parental Controls fully supported. In Calculator App, turn to landscape mode to get a Scientific Calculator. You can save images from emails to your Photo Albums. Added bulk delete & move for messages. All iWork and Office document formats supported in emails. You’ll also (finally, I’ve been wanting this one for a while) be able to search your contacts. You’re able to turn off explicit content. This update/ upgrade will likely come out on or after July 11th. 25,000 people applied to iPhone developer program, only 4,000 were admitted.
Steve announced Mobile Me, the replacement for .Mac (same $99/year price). All current .Mac account holders get automatically upgraded to Mobile Me. 20 GB of storage. All web interfaces are identical in look and usability to their Mac OS X application counterparts. Mobile Me will also work with the iPhone and iPod Touch v2.0 firmware as well as PCs. Mobile Me will be launched mid July.
Serlet (senior vice president of Software Engineering) let loose a few details about Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It will be released in about a year, focusing on under-the-hood changes primarily based future-proofing and bettering the performance of Mac OS X. “Snow Leopard will add a technology called Grand Central’ (also, in the web world, a phone forwarding system) ‘that allows developers to more easily take advantage of the processing resources in multicore Macs”. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) will add an easy way to harness the power of the GPUs for nongraphics tasks. Also, “Snow Leopard will be capable of addressing a theoretical limit of 16 TB of system RAM”. QuickTime X, a newer version of the QuickTime multimedia framework, will allow for extremely efficient playback, a result of iPhone development. Plus, full and native support for Microsoft Exchange in Mail, Address Book, and iChat. It’s been hinted that Safari will contain the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine.
Thats all from the WWDC ‘08 Keynote Event so far, news keeps streaming on in, though. Enjoy, Alex.