Apple’s WWDC Conference 1st day

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, commonly abbreviated WWDC is taking place at Moscone West, San Francisco. The conference is planned for 5 days starting today, from June 7 to June 11, 2010. This has become a big launching pad for Apple to showcase its upcoming products as the whole world gets concentrated here for few days, especially now Apple being such a major electronic player. Apple is enjoying a great success with iPhone, so, they highlighted the number of applications or apps available for iPhone and thus the logo was “the centre of the app universe”. Ok, now gets rolling into the story.

Steve came to stage and announced that “over 5200 attendees from 57 countries are here” for the conference and the tickets were sold off in 8 days, what he didn’t announced, inspite of raising tickets fees from $1295 in 2009 to $1599 in 2010.

iPad – The first announcement was related to iPad. Steve announced the reaching of 2 million sales mark by iPad which was already known to world, but if the number gets broken up by time, it equates to selling of 1 iPad every 3 seconds. He further added, there are now 8,500 exclusive apps available for iPad downloaded over 35 million times, iPhone apps do run but they can’t scale up to resolutions of iPad.

Another notable announcement was the addition of ability to read pdf formatted books or documents in the iBooks(something to cheer for Apple).

The next big thing was categorization of platforms for applications development – HTML5 and Apps store.

Steve also explained a reason for Apple not allowing use of Private API by developers, says they crash while going through the approval procedures(very few will believe).

Next big highlight was Mark Pincus from Zygna coming on to stage and showcasing farmville running on iPhone? but Farmville runs on Adobe Flash.. naaa.. Steve must have made them utilize HTML5.

Apple also presented their own research and study of “US Smartphone market share” where RIM has a 35% share followed by iPhone(28%), Windows(19%), Android and others(9%). Android with 9% share is little hard to believe seeing the progress made by Android in recent times.

iPhone 4 – Here comes the announcement that world was waiting to have a confirm, I mean everyone has the seen the iPhone 4 by now. Well, this iPhone was little different than those, seen on different part of planet, it’s 24% thinner than iPhone 3GS, glass on the front and back, stainless steel frame forming part of antenna, retina display(4 times more pixels in comparison to iPhone 3gs display) i326 pixels per inch, rest already known and follows as front facing camera, micro SIM tray, 5mp camera with HD video recording(720p at 30fps) along with LED flash, 960 x 640 resolution with 3.5 inch display and will be available in two colors namely black and white. They will come in two version iPhone 4 16gb retailing for $199 and iPhone 4 32gb retailing for $299.

Steve also showcased the basic demography of hardware residing under iPhone V4. He tauted A4 chip’s small size for improvement in battery performance as they were able to insert a bigger battery to the device. The battery life now stands at 7 hours of 3G talk, 6 hours of 3G browsing, 10 hours of WiFi browsing, 10 hours of video 40 hours of music and 300 hours of standby. 3G has been updated to scale 7.2Mbps (i.e Quad band HSDPA) along with wifi (802.11n).

There has been a new addition to the hardware which results in a feature called “gyroscope”. Gyroscope basically measures plane of rotation of a device along 3 axis and Pilots know them very well as they form a part of the cockpit and determines aircraft’s position with respect to Earth’s position. It will be used for playing games in iPhone.

iPhone os v4 (iOS 4) – Another major announcement, most of which was already known, though there are few notable changes here and there. Apple gave a proper name to iphone os updates as iOS, however iOS is a trademark owned by Cisco and it’s surely going to be another court battle.

Let me just just line up few of iOS V4 features -

1. Multitasking
2. Ability to create Folders
3. Retina display integration (new)
4. Mail – Unified inbox and threading
5. Enhanced Camera and Photo Apps
6. Deeper enterprise support
7. Enhanced data protection features (New)
8. Mobile device management
9. Wireless app distribution
10. Multiple Exchange accounts with support for Exchange server 2010.
11. SSL VPN support.
12. Bing added to search engine list, though Google still the default search engine. (New)
13. iBooks (New)

iAds – Here comes another big money making launch, iAds – platform designed to deliver ads which are to be hosted by Apple, similar to that of adwords by Google.

Pixar (a company that was created by Steve when he was thrown out of Apple) was basically the first company to be highlighted, not in full blown animation but in the form of banner add.

The second highlight was Nissan showcasing an electric car add. Steve said ” “I pulled one ad in process which was a Nissan ad. They’re going to use it to advertise their electric car, the Leaf. They were hesitant to have me show you, but I convinced them.” (Why would Nissan refuse?)

Steve further added “We’ve got advertisers committing to $60m. Let me tell you some of the brands that will be advertising with us. Nissan, Citi, Unilever, AT&T, Chanel, GE, Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Geico, Campbells, Sears, JC Penny, Target, Best Buy, Direct TV, TBS, and Disney… those are some of the brands.”

Others things -

There was app called “FaceTime” which will be introduced with iPhone 4. In basic terms, it allows you to make video calls over wifi between two iPhone 4. It is nothing new and such features are already present in apps such as “Fring”.

iMovie for the iPhone. – Apple is bringing its movie-editing software to apps store called iMovie for iPhone. The application lets users edit together clips they’ve shot on the device, as well as add things like zooms and pans, transitions, and themes to their work. The app will be $4.99 and work on several versions of the iPhone. In short, it is just like asking money for Windows movie maker in Windows.

There is no doubt in success of iPhone 4 but the way the platform is shaping up with restrictions (banning of private API for developers, Flash by Adobe, restriction on uploading of files such as pdf directly on to the iPhone via computer, transferring files via Bluetooth, putting a limit of 5 computers where iPhone can be synced via iTunes store) and now with iAds. I don’t know to what extent Apple will go in implementing these ads on iPhone, but users don’t seem to complain much.

There is a tag line which goes very well with Apple “You own the device but we decide.. how will you use it”.