By June 6, 2008

What to Expect at WWDC: New iPhone, New Apps and Snow Leopard

image For Apple watchers, next week will — if rumors are correct — bring a host of reasons to rejoice.

The sold-out Worldwide Developer Conference, or WWDC, happening June 9-13 in San Francisco, is widely expected to be the venue at which company CEO Steve Jobs unveils a second-generation iPhone, a panoply of new applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a new MacBook Pro and the next upgrade to OS X, codenamed "Snow Leopard."

image The highlight of the week will be Jobs’ keynote, scheduled for 10 a.m. on Monday morning.

After the keynote, Apple will take developers behind closed doors for a week of secret briefings. (Press are not invited to the conference sessions, and attendees are bound by a nondisclosure agreement.)

IPhone 2
Most hotly anticipated, of course, is the announcement of a new iPhone, which will probably include support for fast, 3-G wireless data and advanced geotagging features, if not outright GPS capability. As with other WWDC rumors, Apple has been characteristically close-mouthed about these details, refusing to confirm even the existence of a new iPhone. That hasn’t stopped bloggers and journalists from engaging in iPhone mania, even going so far as to photograph incoming cargo shipments that may or may not contain new iPhones.

New iPhone Software, New Apps
The iPhone and iPod Touch operating system will also probably receive an upgrade to version 2.0, which, according to leaked shots of posters at the Moscone center, has been rebranded "OS X iPhone." The new OS will also likely include an App Store, integrated with iTunes, enabling users to purchase and install new software.

Apple’s software development kit, or SDK, for the iPhone and iPod Touch has been in the wild for several months. Given what the developer community has achieved with the current iPhone, we can expect some exciting new toys. Programmers working with hacked iPhones have gotten their hooks deep into the OS, creating a video recorder, a Last.FM music streaming client and even an NES emulator. Now that an official development platform is available, look for Apple-sanctioned versions of applications like these to begin appearing next week.

It’s also likely that users of first-generation iPhones will be able to upgrade their handsets with the new OS. Indie developer Gus Mueller of Flying Meat says, "Developers already have their hands full with the current iPhone as it is, but I would love to see GPS in an iPhone."

GPS support is the big question mark. The SDK has support for geotagging photos, which could help turn photo-sharing sites like Flickr into a giant mapping service for photographs. However, it’s still unclear whether the new iPhone will contain a GPS unit or whether it will compute its location by triangulating WiFi hotspots and cell towers, as the current model does.

We could, too, see something like the Streetview overlay demonstrated in Google’s Android platform.

The only thing that is sure is that we will have to wait till Monday to fond our for real and here’s hoping we wont be disappointed or its the HTC Diamond for me.

via Gadget Lab

Posted in: Phones

About the Author:

Seasoned tech blogger. Host of the Tech Addicts podcast.
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