June 8th, 2009
WWDC 09: the announcements (Updated 10x)
Following is a wrap-up of the announcements at WWDC 2009 in San Francisco today.
iPhone 3GS:
- “The S stands for speed.”
- Launching Messages: 2.1x faster
- Load SimCity: 2.4x faster
- Viewing an Excel attachment: 3.6x faster
- Load NYTimes.com: 2.9x faster
- Averages 2x speed increase — some things are even faster
- OpenGL ES 2.0 support
- 7.2Mbps HSDPA
- 3 megapixel camera
- Auto-focus, auto-white balance, auto-exposure, tap-to-focus
- Better light sensitivity. Auto-macro — close as 10cm away. There’s an API.
- Video Capture — 30fps VGA, has an API
- Scrub and edit the video with your finger
- Share it from the iPhone to YouTube
- VoiceControl — (”play songs by The Killers”), ask iPhone “what’s playing now?” You can also say “play more songs like this” and Genius will play more songs like this.
- Digital Compass — Integrated into maps — shows compass to use orientation on maps.
- Hardware encryption — Remote wipe, encrypted iTunes backups
- Improved battery life — Up to 9 hours WiFi, 10 hours video, 30 hours audio, 12 hours 2G talk, 5 hours 3G talk time.
- $199 / 16GB
- $299 / 32GB
- Available: June 19
- Keeping the iPhone 3G for only $99
iPhone 3.0 demos:
- Gameloft’s Asphalt 5 — Racecar sim with Bluetooth P2P multi-player
- AirStrip Critical Care — Medical app alerts Doctor with patient data. The monitor window for looks pretty amazing. “The medical community is flocking to the iPhone.” Dock-connector accessory possibilities are almost endless “I can look at this real-time waveform data even if I’m not at the bedside.” Showing zooming, scrubbing to look for abnormalities.
- ScrollMotion’s iPhone book store — Contains over 500 best-selling book, 50 major magazines, 170 daily newspapers, and 1m books. Whoa. Take that Kindle!
- TomTom — Turn-by-turn directions and a car-kit with: windshield mount (portrait or landscape modes), dock with power, speaker, GPS enhancer, handsfree calling, and audio output. Availability: Summer, Price; TBA.
- ngmoco StarDefense — 3D tower defense game with multi-touch support and expansion sold through in-app purchases.
- Pasco — K-12 science app.
- ZipCar — 6,000 self-service vehicles in US & UK, 300k members. Instant car location and reservation via GPS and the new embedded Google Maps integration. (I’m a ZipCar customer, so this is pretty neat.) You can even activate the car horn remotely (to find the car) through the app!
- Line 6 and Chordmaster — Control your guitar and amp from your iPhone
iPhone SDK 3.0:
- 1,000 new APIs
- In-app purchases
- CoreLocation: turn-by-turn directions and embeddable Google Maps
- Push Notifications: alerts, sounds, badges
iPhone OS 3.0:
- A major new upgrade to iPhone.
- Cut/copy/paste
- Landscape mode
- MMS
- Rent or purchase iTunes content from the phone
- Tethering: 42 partners at launch, no AT&T
- Safari Javascript benchmarks 3x faster
- Auto-fill
- HTM5 support (with offline db support) and audio/video tags
- 30+ languages supported: Hebrew, Arabic, Thai and others
- New feature: Find my iPhone. Log into MobileMe and it shows you on a map where your phone is. Also: “Send it a message, have it play a sound (whether or not you left it in silent mode) and the waiter can find it and call you.”
- Remote wipe
iPhone:
- “it’s been an incredible year for the iPhone. It was less than a year ago that we released iPhone 2.0…”
- Developers have downloaded the SDK over a million times.
- More than 50,000 apps on the App Store
- Sold more than 40m iPhones and iPod touches.
- On April 21 crossed over a billion apps downloaded
Exchange support:
- Built-into Mail, iCal, and Address Book
- Bertrand: “It’s so ironic that we have Exchange support for no extra charge, while Windows PCs have it as an extra product.”
Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6):
- Refinements across the board
- Powerful new technologies
- Exchange support
- “We decided to refine 90% of the OS.”
- Finder completely rewritten — the user won’t see any changes.
- Dock has Expose support — click and hold, voila, you get the window you want
- Install is up to 45% faster
- After you install Snow Leopard you recover over 6GB of disk space!
- Over half the footprint of the OS.
- Mail is up to 2.3x faster
- Price: $29 (Leopard was $129)
- Family pack: $49
- Available September
Safari 4:
- Now shipping for Leopard, Tiger and Windows
- Now bad plug-ins crash inside the browser and don’t crash the OS (or the browser)
- More Javascript speed in Safari: 50% faster in 64-bit
- 100/100 on Acid3 test (IE8 scored 21/100)
- Full history search
- Cover Flow view of the browsing history
QuickTime X:
- Modern foundation
- Hardware acceleration
- ColorSync
- HTTP streaming
- New invisible UI: window title bar fades to a borderless box of video
- One-click clip trimming
- One-click uploading to YouTube and MobileMe
New MacBooks after the jump…
New MacBook Air:
- 1.8GHz for $1,499 ($300 less than before)
- 128GB model for $1,799 ($700 less)
New 13-inch MacBook Pro:
- New 7 hour fixed battery
- Built-in SD card slot
- FireWire 800
- LED-backlit keyboard
- Starts at $1,199
New 15-inch MacBook Pro:
- 2.53/2.66/2.8GHz
- $1,699/$1,999/$2,299
- Top two configurations have: 9400M + 9600M GT
- New seven hour (fixed) battery
- Over 1,000 recharge cycles (average is ~300)
- Batteries have five year lifetime (longer than most notebooks)
- New built-in SD card slot (loses the ExpressCard slot)
- Up to 8GB of memory
- Same glossy display
New 17-inch MacBook Pro:
- Keeps ExpressCard slot
- Same fixed battery
Image Courtesy: Apple
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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