Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2008

It is that time of the year, again. Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, one of the few events where Steve Jobs with his rock star status presents, or should I say, perform his famous keynote.

Developer from all around the world gathered on this conference. This is when Apple showcase new upcoming technologies for its product.

The Coverage

Thanks to those who are fortunate enough (read: lucky bastard) to get inside the hall and update the rest of us, the unfortunate ones. As usual, I searched for IRC back channel chat rooms to get my updates. Watching the chat room while rigorously refreshing Engadget’s live coverage page.

After a few minutes through the first part of the event Twitter dies on me. Twitter had died in other big events in the past. I guess they still are having problems to cope with sudden spike of user updates.

Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo also gets on the game. They are streaming live from twitlive.tv and live.pirillo.com

Someone started a video streaming channel at Yahoo! Live. This also died on me. I got a crapy Internet connection.

The live audio channel from Ustream was the best. Clear clean audio, just ignore the guy taping on his keyboard. Looks like Ustream is where I’ll go to get live updates from major events from now on.

The keynote

The whole keynote focuses on iPhone. They introduce yet again the iPhone 2.0 software. With all the Exchange support plus other bells and whistle, iPhone now has become a serious enterprise device.

Push email, push contacts, push calender and global address lookup, this are all useful features that might just turn iPhone into the ultimate business mobile device.

With the release of the SDK, other third-party apps can now join the fun. They demoed a couple of third-party apps form developers. The iPhone shows potential to be good portable gaming device with its unique controls. You can make use of the built-in 3 axis accelerometer.

One interesting app is the Typepad blogging app. If there is a Wordpress app I’ll be excited. Imagine working on you blog entry, offline and once its ready, online via WiFi or cellular network and publish your entry. That would be cool.

One issues brought up by developers is that third-party apps are not allowed to run in the background. Apple address this issue with a smart solution. Apple is providing third-party developer with a push notification service. Apple will maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone, where a 3rd party server can ping Apple’s notification service to your device. It can push badges, sounds, and custom textual alerts to the phone.

There are also mentions about supporting iWork documents and Microsoft Office documents on the iPhone.

Next they introduced Mobile Me, a web based service that is going to replace .Mac. From the Ustrem audio stream I can heard they emphasize on how Web2.0 me.com is with all the cool ajax stuff going on.

Mobile Me is basically an Exchange like service for the rest of us. It keeps the contacts, calenders, emails and such on your iPhone in sync elsewhere on your Mac.

At the time if this writing, there is still nothing on me.com.

It is iPhone’s first anniversary, about time for the device become wiser. New version of iPhone now with 3G and GPS support. Rumors were true. Another shocking surprise, Apple release the new iPhone 3G in much lower price then its predecessor. $199 for 8GB model and $299 for 16GB model.

The disappointment

There are tons of great new feature for the iPhone, but overall today’s keynote is a disappointment for me. I don’t know about the rest of the world but I am very disappointed. I regret staying till morning where I should be enjoying a goodnight’s sleep.

First disappointment, new iPhone 3G will be sold in 70 countries around the world, except Malaysia. This sucks. I wanted so badly to have iPhone sold officially here. According to Apple’s country list, Malaysia is not even on the list. Bummer.

Second disappointment, the new iPhone 2.0 software is free for iPhone users but cost $9.95 for iPod Touch users. I love my iPod Touch very much. I would love to have the new software upgrade but I think I wont be able to do that.

It is not about the price, I don’t mind paying. My guess is that Apple will distribute it through the iTunes store. I do not have access to iTunes store because my country, Malaysia is not one of the supported countries. I wont be able to get new, official apps from the iTunes store either.

For that reason, I will not blogged about iPhone ever. If Malaysian doesn’t exist to the Apple iPhone team, then the iPhone doesn’t exist to me. Goodnight.

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