Apple WWDC 2009 – the keynote as it happens

I’m not in San Francisco, I’m not going to lie to you, but I’ve got my finger on as many internet pulses as I have fingers and if you keep refreshing this page, I promise you’ll have the word from their mouths before Phil Schiller (and Steve Jobs?) have even spoken them. All the important news and none of the ambience right here.

20:05 And that appears to be it. No tablet and no Jobs. Just a slightly better phone. And I’m at work until 8pm for that?

20:02 16GB version comes in at $199 and 32GB at $299. Cheaper 8GB iPhone 3G (not 3Gs) confirmed at just $99. Available from today. 16GB and 32GB iPhone 3GS out from 19th June.

19:59 Compass displays Long. & Lat. and links directly into Google maps.

VoiceOver accessory to read aloud whatever you touch

Improved battery life:

• 9hrs – Wi-Fi
• 10hrs – Video
• 30hrs – Audio
• 2G Talk – 12 hrs
• 3G – 5hrs

19:56 Voice control for voice dialling. Are we supposed to be impressed> Does anyone use that function? Let me guess, truck drivers, right?

Music playback can be controlled in the same way. Ok, I take some of that back.

Built-in digital compass comfirmed.

19:53 Video capture at 30fps, VGA resolution with auto-focus, AE and white balance too.

Video can be trimmed with the tap of a finger files stored next to your stills.

19:50 Same design as the before. Still with glossy back. Everything is faster – probably due to a better processor.

It’s got 7.2Mbps HSDPA (again?), 3-megapixel autofocus, tap to focus (nice touch/pun), white balanace adjustment on the fly with 10cm macro too. No Nokia N97 but not too shabby.

Video capture confirmed.

19:47 Ok, iPhone 3GS here we go. The slide is up!!

19:45 Two-thirds of all mobile browsing done on iPhone apparently. 50,000 apps with Android’s 5,000 closest.

19:43 Aeons of app demos later, the iPhone OS 3.0 talk is over. It’s out on 17th June – free for iPhone $9.95 for Touch.

19:26 TomTom is involved with a turn-by-turn GPS app from the store. Car kit can also be bought.

19:20 Lots of slides of the iPhone with some new apps. The handset looks identical, so all changes are probably the internal ones we’ve been expecting (and a media tablet?)

19:10 So, now it’s the tease with the iPhone OS 3.0 with 100 new features, a few of which we’re about to hear:

• Cut, copy and paste that works along with an undo with all apps
• Landscape soft keyboard to work with all e-mails, notes and messages
• MMS – hang on, what year is this?
• Search for all calendars, music, notes and e-mail, plus Spotlight which will search across apps too
• iTunes to allow rental of media across 3G – movies, TV shows, music videos, audio books etc
• Parents can limit children’s access according to ratings guide
• Tethering for both Macs and PCs over USB or Bluetooth to share you internet connection
• Autofill
• Support for streaming appropriate quality of video and audio depending upon the speed of yopur internet connection
• Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Greek and Korean languages added all with their own keyboards
• “My iPhone” feature to show all MobileMe users where your iPhone is on a map and allows you to send help messages to it for kind strangers. The alert sounds whether you left it in silent mode or not and you can even delete all the data from it in a worst case situation. iTunes can restore it all from back up if you ever find your phone again.
• Push notification

18:48 iPhone preample on the way. Talk of the SDK and its millions of sales. 40,000,000 iPhones and Touches sold worlwide. That’s, er, a pretty big number.

18:46 Woah! Snow Leopard priced at just $29! Presumably because it’s an upgrade but still, that’s value and from Apple of all people.

18:26 We’re seeing a lot of bar charts proving that the Mail performance on SL is the best and that the browsing speeds on Safari 4 are many times faster than Firefox, IE and Chrome with IE at the bottom of the pile, natch. I imagine it all depends on how you measure it. Also worth noting noe mention of Opera.

18:22 OK, now comes the obligatory snipes at Microsoft followed, of course, by the “brilliance” of OS X Snow Leopard. Cue sexy pictures of large cats.

18:18 The 17-inch Macbook goes down to $2499 and the 13-incher becomes a Pro.

The MacBook Air is next on the agenda with $700 price cut plus some better specs. It stars at $1499 with the SSD versio at $1799.

18:15 You get a 500GB HDD or 256GB SSD for the smoothies out there plus up to 8GB of RAM and a 3.06 GHz Dual Core 6MB Level 2 Cache to run it all if you’d like to spend the maximum $2299 or it’s $1699 for the low end model.

18:09 It’s got a built-in , non replaceable Li-polymer battery which is set to last 7 hours. It’s colour gamut is 60% better and, by jove, it comes with an SD card slot. It’s also greener (blah, blah, blah).

18:07: Quick off the mark, it’s a new MacBook Pro, and a 15-inch one at that.

(via Gizmodo & Engadget)

For latest tech stories go to TechDigest.tv