Steve Keeps the "Good Bits" for Himself

10:35am PST: So I've been following the Engadget - and it looks like they're trotting out all the same developers they did when they announced the SDK 3 months ago.

Still no news on the good stuff. Oh sure, they're showing all the background crap - we did Exchange, education loves us, the Army loves the SDK, etc., etc.

You'd think that with record attendance of 5,200 developers (they sold out or would have had more) - they would just START with the cool stuff and fill in with the crap at the end.

But that would ruin Steve's "show."

10:50am PST: Parading an endless string of applications - games, photo blogging, text editor, piano (to MAKE music on your iPhone?!?), etc.

11:00am PST: Back to Steve. The general consensus from the Engadget folks is - someone kill us. Give us the goods already. And, quite frankly, I couldn't agree more. But, again, it would blow the "show" to just come out and actually TELL people what it is you're officially announcing.

I guess since Steve's name is FIRST on the patent application - he wants his (another) 15 minutes of fame...

11:05am PST: Still no Steve, but they did manage to make another feature that would guarantee that Apple would be in the proprietary loop forever: they just announced a "push" notification feature that will allow developers to send a webservice request to see if a particular phone is on. The senario is for IM chat - and rather than having a background process (like Windows Mobile does) - developers can just "ping" the Apple server and push badges, sounds, and custom textual alerts down to the phone.

(It's cool when you ridicule a competitors product during your own product demo!)

11:10am PST: Only Steve could get applause for announcing the 2.0 version of the iPhone OS would SLIP by a month (available in July). He's also the only one that can get away with charing non-iPhone users (iTouch users) $9.95 for the OS!

Oh, and BTW, they will "allow" developers to keep 70% (!) of their revenue when they sell stuff on the iTunes App Store. Ahem... that means Apple is making a 30% iTunes App Store tax... unless the developer app is free - in which case, there is no charge to anyone (wow, that's really big of him!).

11:15am PST: The store is available in 62 countries, and for <= 10MB applications, you can download over the air (cellular or WiFi) and >= 10MB download either via WiFi or iTunes.

They also will allow Enterprise folks to have an intranet version that will allow them to turn out apps, as well as an ad hoc service that will allow people to register some phones - and send out apps that way as well (as in a teacher teaching how to write iPhone apps!).

Uh oh. "Something new"... MobileMe. It's sort of like Windows Mesh, but supposedly, better. Will synch all the email, calendar, contacts, etc. to all other devices. Works with Mac (duh) and Outlook on the PC. Simple url (me.com).

Now this, is interesting. They've built a bunch of AJAX-apps that look like (their) desktop apps that allow you to manage email, contacts, calendars, etc. - and then - whammo - everything is synchronized.

I bet the folks over at Google Docs are puckering right now...

And... the revenue opportunity (for Apple): $99 per year for 20GB of storage.

11:30am PST: Here is comes... 3G iPhone (thud). They've only sold it in 6 countries - but it's in use all over the world (heee heee - unlocked is not such a bad thing after all).

According to Steve "..everyone wants an iPhone, but we need to make it more affordable."

Uh oh.

"Today w'ere introducing the iPhone 3G. 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."

"We took two other 3G phones -- the iPhone 3G is 36% faster than the nokia N95 and Treo 750 -- and look at the result you get, by the way! Full page on the iPhone, and quite a bit less on the other phones."

Again - I LOVE when you completely ridicule and belittle your competitors - and quantify it by... ummm.. oh yeah, Steve said it - it MUST be true!

11:35am PST: It's official: GPS is in there. Along with a really scary, Big Brother-esque feature that allows them to "...even do tracking."

Tracking? Ummm... ok.... Stalkers unite!

11:45am PST: Here's the price: "iPhone started off at $599 for an 8GB device, which now sells for $399 -- we want to make it even more affordable. I'm happy to tell you the 8GB will sell for $199. We think the iPhone 3G will be affordable to almost everyone. 16GB model for $299 -- for that model we have a white one."

$199? Uh oh. He really might sell the 10M units.

Availability: July 11 - worldwide.

And... I'm spent.

Unless the other handset manufacturers have a really, really good pipeline and story - it will be the case of people standing in line (again) to get the new 3G version (at a CHEAPER price than the current iPhone).

Well, nothing like a good Steve demo to get the old blood pumping...