Apple chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled the new 3G iPhone in his keynote address at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco Monday morning. But the new phone was also surrounded by a host of third-party applications that took advantage of its new features.
There were also several unexpected corollary announcements. Among them, the 3G iPhone will be available in an 8GB version for $199—part of a goal to make the iPhone more affordable. (A 16GB version will sell for $299, and come in white and black.) The 3G iPhone also offers GPS, which works with expanded location-based services. Jobs also announced a number of new initiatives, including a mobile roaming state service called MobileMe, slated to replace Apple's .mac service.
"This is the phone that has changed phones forever," Jobs said in confirming the 3G iPhone. It will go on sale in 70 countries on July 11 – a major increase for Apple in distribution, and far exceeding the company's "stretch goal". The new iPhone includes full support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, a move intended to attract more enterprises and business users, and runs hundreds of third party applications already built with the recently released iPhone SDK.
In a series of demonstrations designed to show that the iPhone's 3G speeds approach Wi-Fi speeds and outdo other 3G phones, Jobs showed the iPhone 3G loading a complex web page in 21 seconds, compared to 59 seconds for the same page using the EDGE service. He also showed it working 36 percent faster than the Nokia N95 and the Treo 750—two competitive 3G phones. Jobs claims the phone offers 5 hours of talk time, five to six hours of browsing, two hours of video and 24 hours of audio, although these should be taken with a grain of salt.
"One of the benefits of fast data is GPS," Jobs said. He showed some unusual GPS interface features on the new phone, including views of a car traveling down a street shown on a map as GPS updates streamed in and showed the location of the car.
The 3G iPhone also has some design enhancements. It has the traditional 3.5-inch screen, but offers a flush headphone jack, several audio quality enhancements, and is thinner at the edges.
Much of the keynote address on Monday was dedicated to showing applications built with the iPhone 2.0 SDK, including Auctions for eBay, several games (including Super Monkey Ball from Sega), a mashup for getting Associated Press news and videos, TypePad mobile blogging, medical applications from Modality, and a very slick application from an individual developer called Cow Music. Cow Music lets you play grand piano, drums, and mix instrumental tracks on an iPhone. The iPhone 2.0 SDK will be available in early July, free to all iPhone users and $9.95 for iPod Touch users.Apple's recently released App Store is targeted to start housing hundreds of iPhone applications, and Apple has some other application distribution strategies afoot. Enterprises will now be able to release applications only for use by their employees through an app authorization scheme, and a new ad-hoc release initiative will allow individuals to share applications in closed groups. For example, a professor could have students sharing iPhone applications only for use among themselves.
Apple's executive vice president of marketing Phil Schiller took the stage to demonstrate a new roaming service, especially for iPhone users but also useful for all Mac users, called MobileMe. Think of Flickr with a lot of useful interface enhancements for photo organizing online, plus web-based e-mail, contacts and other applications all under one roof, and accessible wirelessly. MobileMe, due in July, will cost $99 a year, and includes 20GB of free online storage. (There is a 60-day free trial planned.)
MobileMe does replace the .mac service, but .mac users can continue to use .mac, and use .mac extensions.
Jobs said that just a couple of weeks short of the iPhone's first birthday, six million iPhones have sold. He claims that 98 percent of iPhone users do mobile browsing on the phones "up from essentially zero."
Jobs also said that there are a record 5,200 attendees at Apple's WWDC this week, and that the week will offer many new sessions. There will be a session on the iFund, targeted to let developers know how they can get paid for iPhone applications, and there will be sessions on Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X.
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