WWDC: New iPhone, new OS, good ol’ Steve Jobs

At precisely 1:00pm in the East Coast today productivity took a big hit as millions of workers obsessively clicked “Refresh” on their browsers to get the latest liveblogged update on the Apple WWDC keynote by Steve Jobs. In fact, all the refreshing may have caused Jobs’ demo to go kaput at one point. Okay, so that’s stretching it for a bit, but indeed a demo hit a snag due to some network issues on site. (I wonder who’ll get fired this time?)

Before getting to the new product announcements, Jobs of course had to remind everyone of how well business is doing:

• Recently sold 2 million iPads, one sold every 3 seconds
• 8,500 iPad apps, over 35 million downloads
• 15,000 apps submitted to the App Store per week, in over 30 languages
• Nielsen reports U.S. smartphone market share: RIM – 35%, Apple – 28%, Windows – 19%, Android – 9%
• Mobile browser usage: iPhone – 58.2%, Android – 22.7%

Android, however popular and acquiring devoted fans, still has a long way to catch up. The numbers don’t lie.

So the new iPhone announcement was sort of a given (thanks, Gizmodo). Its official name is iPhone 4 (not iPhone 4G or iPhone HD as rumored) — new design, new hardware, new OS (more on that later), and some new apps. Some highlights:

• Uses Apple A4 CPU (also found in the iPad)
• 9.3mm, 24% thinner than the 3GS
• Front-facing camera (the “One more thing…” Jobs demoed with FaceTime, iPhone 4′s exclusive WiFi-only video calling app)
• Upgraded rear camera to 5MP with LED flash and 5x digital zoom and HD recording
• 3-axis gyroscope tied to accelerometer and compass for enhanced motion sensing (Jobs demoed with a game of 3D Jenga)
• Retinal Display packs 4x as much pixels, 326 ppi in 960×640 display (during demo the NYT website failed to load via WiFi… ooops)
• Better battery life, 300 hours of standby, 7 hours of 3G talk time, 10 hours of video playback, 40 hours of music playback, etc.
• iMovie and iBooks for iPhone

iPhone 4 pre-order starts June 15 and goes on sale June 24.

And what’s all the fancy hardware without the OS, right? What we’ve learned to be iPhoneOS 4 is now renamed to iOS 4. The Gold Master is available for developers today, and the update is ready for all on June 21. Older i-device owners will be happy to know that the OS upgrade comes free except that not all features are enabled on older devices. Sounds fair to me.

More thoughts about the announcements in another post…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Everything you need to know about the iPhone 4 (mobilecrunch.com)
• Apple To Surpass 100 Million iOS Devices Sold This Month (techcrunch.com)
• The iPhone 4 Is Here (mashable.com)

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Tagged as: Apple, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Steve Jobs, WWDC