We were truly excited about Steve Jobs’ keynote address at the 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 10) today, and he didn’t help calm us down any by saying we ‘won’t be disappointed’!
Now that the keynote is past, and our baited breath has turned into coffee breath, we’d like to honestly say we were a wee bit disappointed. We knew that Jobs was almost definitely going to show off the new iPhone (name confirmed as the iPhone 4) today, and to not do so would have been to go against three consecutive years of iPhone tradition, but that it would be nearly the only thing he talked about wasn’t the storm of revelations we pictured!
And this is when we realised that the leaked prototypes we all ogled at in the past month or so have now made our eyes water in unrequited expectation… We saw too much of the ’oh so’ closely guarded secret, and let our guards down, ending up not truly satisfied with just the unveiling. But that might be exaggerating things a little. When Steve Jobs says “the iPhone reinvented the phone”, he certainly wasn’t kidding, and however expectant we might have been, it doesn’t subtract too much from the sheer potential of the iPhone 4:
iPhone 4
We know that to start reporting with the statistics and updates that Steve (first name basis at this point – perhaps it’s the sense of familiarity) traditionally showers upon his audience before winding up for the curtain raiser would only make you scroll down in frustration, so let’s leave those for later, and start with the main attraction, the coup de jour, the iPhone 4:
Jobs always breaks it down into chewable morsels for us to swallow, and he didn’t disappoint (or choke) us. Here is the iPhone 4 introduced in 8 easy parts (or as Jobs put it, 8 out of the 100s of new features):
1)All New Design
As we’ve said before, the leaked prototypes did give away a bit too much for us to be overexcited about this, but some surprises certainly were in store for us…
- Stainless steel body, glass on front and back
- Super thin at 9.3mm, 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS, and the “thinnest smartphone on the planet”
- Dedicated volume controls and mute button on the left side
- Micro SIM tray on the right side
- Front facing camera, receiver and the home button on the front
- Rear facing camera and LED flash on the back
- 3.5mm jack, sleep/wake button, and secondary microphone on top
- Primary microphone, 30pin connecter, and speaker on the bottom
We knew all this, but it was great to see it confirmed anyways, in high-res. Jobs next revealed the shocker, the reason for all those un-Apple-like seams/lines we’d all noticed on the prototypes… antennas. That’s right, three seams, to break the stainless steel edge casing into 5 different integrated antennas, a never-before-used engineering work that Jobs called “really cool”. They’re for UMTS, GSM, GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth.
Read on to know more about the 7 remaining defining features of the iPhone 4, from the camera to the display
2)Retina Display
Hey! Is that virtual light being thrown directly onto my retina? Nope! What is it? It’s the same 3.5-inch display of the 3GS, with the same IPS LCD technology, except now it has 4 times the number of pixels per square inch, or 326ppi. That’s right, it’s roughly 4x, at 960×640 pixels with a 800:1 contrast ratio, resulting in much, much sharper images, text and video. To give you a rough idea, it has 78% of the pixels of the 10-inch iPad. Jobs called the iPhone 4’s screen’s tech “quite a bit better than any OLED technology”, and said that it would set the standards for the “next several years.”
Jobs went on to show the iPhone 3GS screen versus the iPhone 4 screen, to give users a better idea. But blown up to that size on the wall, we feel the 3GS’ hapless pixelation was quite unfair.
You might be wondering now how your boring (and as you will notice below, quite pixelated) old apps would look on this screen, and this point of course was of tremendous importance to the developers, who recently broke their heads over converting their iPhone apps to the iPad’s resolution. Jobs allayed these fears a bit, saying that the iPhone OS 4 will automatically run the apps. He then said, text would automatically be rendered to the higher resolution. And then, the bomb: “If you do a little bit of work and open up the hood of your app to put in higher-res, they will look stunning.” Aspirin, anyone?
3)Powered by the A4 chip
Jobs introduced the chip as designed by his own company, and praised its power management, which manages to squeeze out:
- 40% more talk time on 3G, from 5 hours to 7 hours
- 6 hours of 3G browsing
- 10 hours of WiFi browsing
- 40 hours of music
- 300 hours of standby
- 10 hours of video
He then showcased the innards of the iPhone 4, and how it is “packed to the gills” with components, from the A4 chip, to the Micro SIM tray, the 3G radios, the Li-ion battery, and the speaker.
Job went on the extol the virtues of the iPhone’s manufacturing, saying how it was arsenic, BFR, Mercury and PVC free, apart from being highly recyclable. Some more specs were shown off, indicating up to 32GB of storage, 802.11n WiFi, dual microphones for noise cancellation, and Quad-band HSDPA/HSUPA for 7.2Mbps down, 4.8 Mbps up (Jobs: “that’s theoretically because the carriers don’t support it yet”).
Read on to know about the 5 remaining features of the iPhone 4, from gaming to the camera and more…
4)Gyroscope
To make all those iPhone gamers and game developers even happier than they are, and to firmly show the cynical scoffers, Apple has squeezed in a 3 axis gyroscope in the iPhone 4, offering 6 axis motion sensing with pitch, roll & yaw, rotation about gravity, and the accelerometer. And along with the new CoreMotion APIs, developers will be able to offer truly precise control to their customers, that’s “perfect for gaming”. He then showed off the “precise movement” and rotational ability by playing a Jenga-like game.
The gyroscope has joined the 4 other sensors on the iPhone: the accelerometer, compass, proximity sensor, and ambient light sensor.
5)New Camera System
One of the most eagerly looked forward to features of the next iteration of the iPhone, the rear facing camera has been upgraded from a 3.15MP camera to a 5MP camera. According to Jobs though, they are not playing the megapixel game, but instead, are aiming to turn “so small” lenses of camera, and capture sufficient photons on the sensor for vivid and low-light photography. This has been achieved by using a photographic technology that is usually normally reserved for larger cameras – a backside illuminated sensor.
Jobs also emphasized that instead of making the pixels smaller as they increased the megapixels, they have maintained the same size. Along with this, iPhone 4 will have LED flash and 5X digital zoom, apart from its tried and tested tap to focus interface.
As you can see above, the pictures are quite noise-free if not super crisp, and are going to please old noise-beleaguered iPhone users everywhere.
Highlight of the new camera system was that fact the iPhone can finally say HD is a feather in its hat, for it can now record that it can also record 720p video at 30 frames per second. It also offers tap to focus for video.
The iPhone will also bring Apple’s video-editing software on board, iMovie, be it in a simplified form, called iMovie for the iPhone. It does look pretty versatile, with a pinch interface for timelines, image and video splicing, recording mid-project, audio overlay, and geotagging.
Sharing is pretty simple as well, with “one-click” sharing on mail, MMS, MobileMe or YouTube. The iMovie app will be available for $4.99
6)iPhone OS 4
Or should we say, the iOS 4. Steve’s proclaimed it, to surely get away from the marginal confusion that iPhone OS 4 induces when it’s said to cover the iPad and iPod Touch. Steve called it the “most advanced mobile OS in the world”, with over 1500 APIs for developers. He then re-enumerated all its features, from folders to the unified inbox, email threading to better enterprise integration, and of course multitasking, which he famously repeated himself to emphasize, saying “that though they weren’t the first, they took some time to figure out how do it right”. If you’d like to know more about the newly named iOS 4, you can refer to our comprehensive coverage of it here.
New things promised in iOS 4 were enhanced camera and photo apps, and three search options (Google, Bing and Yahoo). Jobs also announced that the iOS 4 would be released in Golden Master Candidate form today.
Ending on a strong note, he went on to share “another major milestone” for Apple, as they will hit the 100 million iOS devices sold mark this June. He then went on to sell the iOS 4 platform as the definite “market for your [developers’] applications”.
Read on to know more about the iPhone 4, from the iBooks platform to pricing and availibility….
7)iBooks for iPhone
iBooks, something that has experienced great success on the iPad platform, has been enhanced for both. You can now not only create highlights, but also make notes, and bookmark pages (which also reflect in the table of contents). PDF viewing and reading is also fully supported, with a separate “bookshelf” for them. All this supposedly looks pretty gorgeous on an iPad, and these features will be out “within the month”.
iBooks will now also be able to sync over the iOS 4 devices, wirelessly and automatically, including your notes and bookmarks.
He also reminded the audience of the place the iBookstore has in the triumvirate of stores on the iOS 4 plaform, including iTunes Store and the App Store, a comment spiced with the fact that the stores have hit 16 billion downloads cumulatively. Developers were also reminded about the 150 million credit card accounts in the Apple iOS marketsphere, that were ready to buy their apps.
8)iAds
An ad delivery platform that will enable developers to offer advertisements within their applications which can viewed without the customer having to exit the app, Steve Jobs said his vision of “emotion and interactivity” was solely to enable developers to “earn money so that they can continue to make free and low-cost apps”. If you’d like more information about the iAds platform, refer to our comprehensive article covering it.
He let developers know that Apple itself will sell and host the ads, so all they’d have to do is tell Apple where to put them in their applications, and “then make money”. This amounts to 60% of the revenues derived. He also dropped the names of a lot of companies who’ve already bought mobile ads space from Apple, from Unilever to Target, Sears to citi, Disney to GE. The platform will come alive on July 1.
Though Jobs himself said there were 8 out of the 100s of new features that really defined and showed off the new iPhone, he had one last surprise up his sleeve: #9.
9)FaceTime Video Calling
While the name is certainly nothing to write home about, the demonstration was convincing enough, of Jobs face talking (or video calling) through a very congested WiFi network to his “friend”, Jonny Ive. They discussed how they used to dream of this technology, and how it’s finally here. After setting up lunch date with Ive, Jobs, went on to explain how it all worked:
It is video calling between iPhone 4 devices, requiring a simple WiFi connection (with no mention of 3G support), and no setup. The video calling was followed by a sugar-coated presentation showing babies and parents, husbands and wives, friends and family, all chatting. The demo even showed how it would be useful for sign language.
Price and Availability
Body colours: Black, White
Case (Bumper) colours: White, Pink, Orange, and more
Price at normal qualifications, contracts: $199 for 16GB model, $299 for 32GB model
Dock: $29
Date of retail: June 24th
Pre-order start: June 15th
First wave of availability (June): US France, Germany, UK, Japan
Second (August): 24 nations, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, HK, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and more.
Third (September): 40 more nations
As for you who are wondering when the iOS 4 will available as an update for your older Apple touch devices, you will be happy to know that free iOS 4 upgrades for iPhone 3GS/3G, iPad, and iPod Touch will be available from June 21st.
Read on for the interesting statistics and facts that Steve Jobs began his keynote address with…
OPENING STATISTICS and FACTS:
WWDC 10
- WWDC 10 seats sold out in 8 days to 5200 developers from 57 countries
- WWDC 10 will have over 120 sessions, 120 hands on labs, and 1,000 Apple engineers participating
iPAD
- Sold over 2 million iPad since it launched, approximating 1 iPad sold every 3 seconds
- iPad is shipping in 10 countries, 19 by the end of July
- 8500 native iPad apps, excluding 225,000 iPhone apps in the App Store
- iPad apps have been downloaded over 35 million times, approximating 17 apps per iPad
APP STORE
- 15,000 apps submitted every week in 30 different languages; 95% are approved within 7 days
- 3 reasons why 5% don’t make the cut:
- App doesn’t function as advertised
- Use of private APIs (not allowed to ensure seamless app migration between OS versions)
- The app crashes
- 5 billion apps downloaded from the App Store
- $1 billion paid to developers with revenue sharing
iPhone Market Usage
- iPhone has 35% of the US smartphone market share
- iPhone has 58.2% of the US mobile browser usage