Live Keynote Coverage:

NOTE: I will be updating this page as the keynote progresses to bring you my running commentary on each new announcement. This page will not automatically refresh for you; you will have to refresh manually. Please be kind to our servers and limit your refreshes to once every few minutes - thanks!

Also be advised that Apple will be posting a video recording of the keynote on their site later in the day. I'll provide the link when it becomes available.

----

- Once again, here it comes: The Apple Store is down! The Apple Store is down!

- Side note: Smell that? That's the (now) traditional smell and sound of Twitter's servers slowly dying on Apple Keynote day. They're disabling features to stave off the crash. Wonder if Twitter will hold up today?

- 9:55AM PST: Remember folks, this is the first WWDC to have completely Sold-Out, so there's TONS of folks around. That means a lot of iPhone developer interest.

- People are seated in the hall, pre-keynote music, etc. Excitement: MAX. 5 minutes!

- 10AM PST: Al Gore's in the crowd at the keynote. Perhaps for another segment about how Apple is caring for the environment?

- 10:06AM: Steve is on stage! The Eagle has landed!

- Talking about iPhone.

- Snow Leopard will be "after lunch" (so not part of keynote.) All iPhone, all the time right now.

- 250K developers downloaded the iPhone SDK (Whoa!) within 95 days. That's a lot of apps.

- 3 Parts to SDK: Enterprise, SDK, new end user features.

- Enterprise is up first: Cisco built-in secure VPN. Push e-mail, remote erase, etc. (blah blah blah corporate stuff)

- 35% of Fortune 500 companies participating in beta programme. Higher Education institutions are also working on apps. He's now showing a bunch of CTOs talking about how their employees are asking for iPhone apps. (woot more iPhone compatibility in the corporate world, leave your crackberries!)

- Nifty contact search was demoed in video. Much like iTunes/Mac OS X searching. Search results pop up as you type. (Thank the gods! Finally I can search! Can't tell you the amount of times I forgot whether I have a last name for someone in my phonebook or not.)

- 10:16AM: Now to talk about SDK. Scott Forestall is taking the stage.

- Rehashing the technologies available in the SDK that were announced at the iPhone Software Roadmap (Cocoa Touch, Media, Core Services, Core OS, etc.)

- Stresses that the OS X iPhone kernel is the same as the Mac OS X kernel.

- Talking about the dev tools, easy interface building with Cocoa Touch (unique to iPhone, for touch interfaces, could make its way to Mac OS X if Apple builds a touch computer is my speculation.)

- Demoing building a UI using the dev tools.

- The demo is using the iPhone API to pull contacts from your address book, then uses Core Location API to look up the 10 nearest contacts to you contacts withing 10 miles of you (physical proximity.) Nifty.

- 10:24AM: Interface Builder automatically arranges screen elements depending on iPhone orientation.

- YAWN! I know this is the developer's conference, but come on - new iPhone baby! Announce!

- Oh yay. Demo is done!

-10:28AM: Ethan Einhorn from Sega is coming on to talk now. Oooo Games time! (remember they showed off Super Monkey Ball at the last keynote.)

- Super Monkey Ball is now up to 100 levels. Great tilt-controls. Could this be the first real competitor to Nintendo's mobile dominance?

- Ebay is now onstage. Auctions apps. (Oh great, now auction addicts will be able to check their auctions on the go. I predict the downfall of civilisation soon.)

- BTW Super Monkey Ball will be available for the iPhone for $9.99 (Wow, cheaper than I expected. Very nice. Shoots those $25-$30 rumours out of the water.)

- The Ebay Auctions apps has lots of functionality. Auctions you list, auctions you've bid on, auctions you've been outbid on, custom photo viewer, etc...

- 10:34AM: Ebay app will be free. (Duh.)

- Sam Altman from "Loopt" is now up. (What the frack is Loopt?!)

- Ah, Loopt is an app that shows where your friends are on a map, leveraging Core Location. You can then easily call/text them. Cross platform compatible.

- Loopt will be free. (OK, that makes it cool, because that means iPhone/iPod Touch users will now automatically have a location aware social network. Nice.)

- Typepad is up next. (Please please please announce a Typepad/Movable Type client for free, pretty please!)

- W00T mobile blogging app with picture upload capability. Yay! (Yes, but is it Movable Type compatible too?!)

- Bah, no mention of Movable Type compatibility (Typepad runs on Movable Type, which is what runs Homotron.net)

- Typepad app will also be free.

- 10:40AM: Next up is the Associated Press.

- Developed "Mobile News Network." Can pull up AP photos, video content. You can also send news to the AP via the app, for mobile guerrilla reporting (VERY important for first person reports and especially places where the government locks down media outlets e.g. Myanmar, etc.)

- Location aware, showing you local news sources affiliated with AP. Nice.

- Mobile News Network will also be free. (I'm liking all the free apps!)

- Pangea Software is up next (remember them? They're the ones who developed Nanosaur and all those free games Apple included back in the day of the iMac's first release)

- 2 Games will be demoed. First up is Enigmo.

- Enigmo is a touch base physics game.

- 2nd game is Cro-Mag Rally. Using the iPhone as a stearing wheel, Wii-mote style. (Gah, really?! How the hell are you supposed to see where you're going when you're using the screen as a steering wheel?)

- Both games will be $9.99 (Will this be the usual price for iPhone games?)

- Yet another app demo from another developer (get to the new hardware already!) - Band, a virtual instrument song writing application.

- Next up is MLB. (Sports fans get ready for on the go baseball mania and stats, most likely.)

- 10:51AM: Real time baseball game video updates.

- Next is Modality.

- (BTW, they keep mentioning "when the app store launches" - gah, not today, it seems.)

- Modality is a medical application for students. Allows med students to pick regions of the body and get detailed anatomical images/information.

- Another medical app: MIMvista.

- (Please let this be the last app demo, we don't need anymore, specially if we won't be able to get them today!)

- 10:58AM: MIMvista is also for medical imagery. From what I understand though, it's to visualise diagnostic medical imagery. CAT scans, etc. Can display live 3D data. (Interesting, but not a new iPhone.)

- Showing one more application, another game: a Digital Legends developed fantasy adventure. Uses accelerometer for jumping. People are saying it's like God of War-ish.

- Back to Scott Forestall.

- Devs have been REALLY asking for background application support. How to solve this?

- Enabling background apps not the way to do it. (Any Windows Mobile user will tell you this is bad. Having apps run in the background with no UI means you don't know what the hell is running, slows down your system.)

- Solution: PUSH notification service API.

- The push solution has the iPhone maintain one main connection to Apple when apps are closed. Developers send notification to Apple, which then sends a notifcation down to individual iPhones.

- Oh thank the gods! Steve Jobs is back on stage!

- 11:06AM: New features: Contact search (as we saw earlier), full iWork document support.

- Also MS Office support (Word, Excel and Powerpoint.) (Does this include the new OOXML crap from MS, I wonder?)

- Bulk delete/move for messages (W00T!)

- You can also save images now.

- Scientific mode on the calculator when you rotate it.

- Parental Controls.

- MORE LANGUAGES! YAY! (the linguist in me is quite happy, can you tell?)

- iPhone Software v2.0 will be available "early July." (damnit!) Free for iPhone users, $9.99 for iPod Touch users.

- Now talking about App Store. Automatic app updating, developers get 70% cut if their apps aren't free (otherwise it's all free.) Fairplay DRM (same that is used on iTunes store purchases.)

- Apps less than 10MB will be available over the cell network to download. If bigger, you'll need to use iTunes on your computer of a WiFi connection on the iPhone. (hrm, seems AT&T didn't want massive app downloads on their network - understandable.)

- Enterprise users can authorise certain iPhones to run certain apps, can distribute apps via their own intranet (bypassing Apple?)

- Moving on to new stuff: MobileMe!

- Phil Schiller time. What is MobileMe?

- "Exchange for the rest of us"

- 11:15AM: Push e-mail, calendars, contacts "like ActiveStink, I mean ActiveSync" (hardy harr harr)

- All your information available all the time, it all stays synced via "the cloud" (oh geez, you know when Phil Schiller uses it that means it's officially over done as a term.)

- Syncs your iPhone, Mac, PC. All changes synced immediately. Outlook support on Windows.

- Also will all be available on Me.com with AJAX web 2.0 goodness for a web desktop experience. (OK, this part is neat, b/c then I have access to it with any computer I'm using, if for some weird reason I don't have my iPhone with me... oh wait that's NEVER.)

- Photos also synced.

- Demo of MobileMe.

- Launched right in your browser. Basically all the main Mac OS X apps are here in AJAX fashion. Mail with multiple windows, etc.

- Calendar, contacts, photos. (This is all well and good, but how much? I know it ain't going to be a cheap fee.)

- iDisk support too. You can distribute files to your friends.

- Stressing the instant automatic updating.

- 11:28AM: $99/year. 20GB of storage space. Replacing .Mac. Current .Mac users will be automatically upgraded.

- When iPhone 2.0 software launches, there will be a 60 day free trial of MobileMe for everyone. (get 'em hooked, eh?)

- Steve is now mentioning the iPhone's first birthday. (ooooo I smell hardware!)

- "iPhone received much critical acclaim..." yaddah yadda Jesus phone yadda yadda...

- 90% user satisfaction rate.98% browse online, 80% text message (if only it was unlimited)

- 6 million sold in the first year (well until they were all sold out in the past month)

- Apple knows the iPhone is being used in more places than the 6 countries they're officially in. They're planning more international releases.

- 56% of non iPhone purchasers say they didn't get it b/c of price (foreshadowing?)

- INTRODUCING IPHONE 3G!

- Solid metal buttons, same screen, camera (really, same camera? now upgrade there?)

- Thinner, black plastic back (less scratches in the back?), flush headphone jack (thank the gods!), improved audio.

- Demoing 3G speeds over EDGE. Much faster, duh.

- "Feels better in your hand than previous iPhone."

- 11:36AM: iPhone 3G is even faster than other 3G phones. 36% faster than Nokia N95 and Treo 750.

- 300 hours of standby time. 5 hours 3G talk time (10 hours if you disable 3G), 5-6 hours 3G browsing, 7 hours video, 24 hours audio.

- Built in GPS for location aware services.

- Price Steve, get to the price!

- Aiming for 6 more countries to release iPhone 3G in. End goal of 25 countries total in the next few months (yummy yum languages.)

- Heh, a Risk like slide is being shown by Steve, showing iPhone taking over the world. lawl.

- Correction: goal is 70 countries in the coming months. Whoa.

- (Ummmm how much have you ramped up production, Apple? That's a ton of iPhones...)

- PRICE: iPhone 3G 8GB: $199 (HOLY CRAP.)

- $299 for 16GB version. Also will have a white 16GB version. (Wow, nice on the price redux!)

- Available July 11 in 22 countries.

- Time to show the new commercial. Cue the next iTunes music best seller song.

- Steve is now thanking the iPhone team.

- That's it! It's over! Thanks for tuning in, folks. Stay with us here at Homotron for continuing coverage. Remember that Steve promised us we'd be seeing Snow Leopard, the new Mac OS X 10.6 later on today, so stay with us!