Apple @ WWDC
Today, at its annual World Wide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled an updated, 3G iPhone. With this addition comes an assisted GPS chip, and, perhaps the best “feature” people are stoked about: a price drop. 8GB starts at $199, and 16GB at $299. Considering the original had started at $599 for 8GB, this is a huge price drop!
True, the phone is still tied to an AT&T contract in the US, but with the addition of the AppStore and the final release of the SDK and firmware 2.0 (all announced previously; just revisited this time around), the phone is starting to really heat up its appeal as the best smartphone around. For corporate users, Apple has worked hard to line up Exchange compatibility, and various little features that have already been detailed previously, but are sure to garner another look from prospective IT departments.
Earlier in his keynote, Steve Jobs announced the successor to .Mac, MobileMe, which is essentially a revamp of the service that increases its web prescence, employing oodles of Ajax, push-email/contacts/calendars/etc to try and become your mobile hub as you move around from device to device. With Windows and Mac OS compatibility, the service is definitely increasing in scope. Pricing will stay the same, with current users getting a bump from 10GB of storage to 20GB.
For now, that’s about the gist of it. There were many, many demos of iPhone apps and games—a nifty social networking app, a news application by the Associated Press that hooks into the GPS API to do some nifty mapping of stories, and a few games that rival the Nintendo DS’ in graphics, and the Wii in motion control.
Neither of the two will be released until July the 11th, so there’s still some lead time. For now, here’s a few videos related to MobileMe.
Recently, Adobe released a beta version of Lightroom 2.0 for public consumption. Here’s an image of the result achieved by solely using arguably the best new feature of Lightroom 2.0: masking.
