Live from Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 preview event

11:48AM And that's that! We're outta here. Thanks for reading, and thanks to the amazing Blogsmith team and our Weblogs design crew for keeping this ship steady!

11:48AM A question about the approval process, Phil is handling.

"96% are approved, but there are things we have to watch out for. There have been issues, issues about content that's available to children for instance. But at the end of the day, we have a great solution that's working, and we're constantly making it better. We're tracking these numbers, and speaking with developers, and we are constantly doing that."

"I want to thank you all for joining us today."

11:45AM Q: Could you serve audio files over Bluetooth, could you move them onto a device?

This question essentially has stumped the crew. They don't know how to answer!

Scott: "I think probably not -- you couldn't move the file." A bit of a confusing one.

11:43AM Q (from us!): Are you addressing any of the lagginess with the new OS? We saw some of that when you loaded SMS up.
A: (short and sweet) We're definitely addressing those issues. The units you saw today are demo units.

11:40AM Q: Push notification, will you make uptime promises?
A: No.

11:39AM Q: Where do you stand on tethering?
A: Scott (explains tethering): We're supporting tethering in the client side, we're building that support in. We're working with our carriers around the world. We are building that support in.

11:37AM Q: Will peer to peer work with other devices?
A: It's limited to Bonjour, peer to peer devices.

11:34AM Q: Flash? What are you doing?
A: We have no announcements on that topic today. But there are a lot of video streams we can handle. h.264 works great. We're adding HDTV streaming for audio and video. We think there's a lot of great video solutions for a single clip.

11:33AM Q: Why did copy paste take so long?
A: Scott: It's not that easy. There were security issues.

11:32AM Q&A with Scott, Greg, and Phil Schiller.

11:28AM Okay, Q&A time...

11:28AM So... just wait until June everyone! "So Scott and I would like to thank you, we look forward to the amazing things devs will do. Thank you very much."

11:27AM "What about the rest of us? iPhone OS 3.0 will be available this Summer. A free update to all of our iPhone 3G customers. And it works on the original iPhone. Now the hardware has changed between these two devices. For instance, A2DP and MMS won't be available on the iPhone 1st gen. It's also available for the iPod touch... for $9.95."

11:26AM "We've designed this to be compatible with the thousands of apps, but you should start testing this for your apps now." "We're adding 15 more countries to the App Store list... it will be available in 77 countries."

11:25AM That's for developers... what about the end user?

11:25AM "So we hope you're as excited about this as we are. So how will you get this? The developer beta is available today. Everyone will have access to it. Starting today we'll have all kinds of info available."

11:24AM "And these are only a few of the hundred new features. We're really excited about this. It is a major update. And I can't wait until you get your hands on it. And to tell you about it, Greg Joswiak."

11:24AM "So, iPhone 3.0. We are so excited about this. In-app purchase, peer to peer, accessories, Maps, push notifications, cut/copy/paste, landscape, messages, Voice Memos, Calendar with support for CalDAV, new Stock app, Search, and Spotlight."

11:22AM "So, Spotlight. A single place to search across your phone. And again, these are only a few of the new features that come with 3.0. Like Note Sync, you can sync your notes." Auto-fill, YouTube accounts, stereo Bluetooth! WiFi autologin, anti-phising.

11:21AM Spotlight lives far left in your pages. "That is Spotlight." Big applause for that.

11:20AM This is Apple's universal search. Makes sense, of course, already available to those with jailbroken phones.

11:20AM You can scroll to the Spotlight homescreen. It lives in your pages of apps as its own page. It works as you'd expect, a keyboard is present and allows you pop up anything you're looking for in a list below a search box.

11:19AM Demo time!

11:18AM "But we didn't stop there. We thought, wouldn't it be nice if there was a single location you go to search all of these. That's what we did. We created a new home screen to do this. We call it Spotlight."

11:18AM "Search in Calendar: you can search for appointments. Also, search in iPod, song name, album, artist... and, search in Notes, by the title or body."

11:17AM "Next is Search. In iPhone 2.0 we added search in contacts. This year we're adding search to all of our key applications, starting with Mail. You can search from, to, subject, and all headers. If the message isn't on your iPhone, you can continue that search on the server."

11:16AM "Stocks: some nice additions here. We're adding support for news stories at the bottom, and details right in the app. We've also added landscape view."

11:16AM "Next, support for subscriptions. This is the .ics format."

11:16AM Voice Memos does pretty much what you expect. "Next, Calendar. In iPhone 1.0 we supported personal calendars, last year, we added Exchange support, and this was always up to date. This year we're adding support for two additional calendar types. The first is CalDAV."

11:14AM Ah, you can finally add contacts. It sounds like you can add photos / audio to your devices if you get them in a message. "Next, Voice Memos."

11:13AM "Next: messages. We have a fantastic text messaging app in the iPhone. You can now forward and delete multiple messages. But the big news is that we're adding support for MMS."

11:12AM "So, landscape in Mail. It works in Notes and SMS as well."

11:12AM Cocoa Touch controls have support for copy/paste built in. "Next... landscape. We always had support for landscape built in. This is great for reading stories. A lot of users love that landscape keyboard. We're now taking that to all of our key apps. Starting with Mail."

11:10AM "Now there's one more thing I want to show you. And that's photos. We've had requests to send more than one pic at a time -- and now you can do that." You can select multiple pictures and copy them, then paste them into a mail message. "So, copy/paste in iPhone 3.0." Applause. Applause for a feature that every other device in the world has. Odd.

11:09AM "But this works for 3rd party apps as well. Here's wikimobile." We're going to go ahead and say that copy/paste probably works the same here. Yes -- it does.

11:08AM Just loaded up SMS -- took ages to load. Same process as Safari to grab SMS text.

11:08AM It also copies HTML. Shake to undo. Clever.

11:07AM Long press to select blocks of text in Safari. Using the same engine that zooms in on blocks of text to intelligently know what to select.

11:07AM Now he's showing off copy/paste across apps -- same selection bubble and process in Notes. He jumped into mail and pasted. So... just exactly like copy and paste on everything. Zany.

11:06AM To select a whole block, you double tap, slide with your finger or thumb (you get a new magnifying glass), and pull across what you want to grab.

11:05AM Double tap on text, and it automatically selects it -- then puts grab points at the end of the selection, with a cut/copy/paste bubble above it.

11:05AM Ha, an email with flight info for Oceanic 815.

11:04AM "We've been working really hard to design an easy to use interface for this on our touchscreen display. Let me demo it for you right now."

11:04AM "Now as I said before, 3.0 brings a lot of new features for devs, but for customers as well... starting... with cut, copy, and paste." Big cheers.

11:03AM Scott: "How can I go on after that. Wow. That duet was played using our new API. You know, when we created the SDK, it was to make devs really successful. That's why we work our asses off every day."

11:02AM Huge applause for that! Huge!

11:02AM Dr. Wang and assistant are about to perform "a little ditty" for us. "This is Phantom of the Opera on Leaf Trombone." It is. It is! Everyone is giggling. This is pretty amazing, just because it's so intensely bizarre.

11:01AM "We're excited about the new iPhone SDK." He's showing off an app called Leaf Trombone World Stage. Seriously. It's a multiplayer music app.

10:59AM Dr. Wang is intense.

10:58AM Scott: "Next, is Smule. The creators of Ocarina. Here's Dr. Ge Wang."

10:57AM Showing off multiplayer. Pretty sweet. The crowd here seemed to like it. Good thing they landed a frag at the end there.

10:57AM This is pretty impressive, a fairly smooth FPS with in game chat. Graphics aren't too shabby, if a bit basic. The controls don't look super easy...

10:56AM "Okay, now let me show off something completely different. LiveFire. I'm going to launch into a global game server." Wow, this looks pretty sweet.

10:55AM He just showed off in-game purchases. Very similar to The Sims.

10:54AM "I just received a push notification to a Touch Pet dogs playdate." This is cute. Virtual dogs are running around onscreen. A few people are cracking up in here.

10:53AM "We're going to show you two games today we're working on. The first is Touch Pets, and our multiplayer first person shooter, LiveFire."

10:52AM Neil Young... not THE Neil Young. "Hello. The iPhone is a wonderful device. It's always on, always with you, and always connected to a network. It can enable new types of social play and new gaming experiences."

10:51AM Scot: "So imagine the possibilities. We think this is profound. Next, ngmoco -- a startup that develops games exclusively for the iPod touch and iPhone. Here's a sneak peak of some new games they're working on."

10:50AM They're really showing off a lot of detail on this app. It's fairly in-depth, and seems to pull in a handful of the new APIs. Still, not what most people came here for today.

10:48AM This is interesting. The app works out dieting and keeps track of glucose levels. We could definitely see this coming in handy for those with diabetes.

10:47AM A cool idea, but we'd like to see just a small dock connector that functions as the finger pricking device. Are we asking too much?

10:46AM They're showing off glucose testing (finger pricking). "Given the new SDK, the meter can transmit that data over Bluetooth or the dock connector."

10:45AM Now they've brought up Anita Mathew from Lifescan (a Johnson and Johnson company). Please show the iPhone heart surgery app / hardware combo. No... just diabetes testing. This could be cool.

10:44AM Scott: "We had to spend the last six months retooling our push notification for companies just like ESPN." Big laughs.

10:44AM Oke Okaro is off... the ESPN app looks pretty slick.

10:42AM Ooh, they're showing off streaming video right now. Looks pretty damn nice. "We're using the new media player that automatically adjusts quality for the bandwidth you have."

10:41AM ESPN just made a sports joke we didn't get. We hope we don't get kicked out of our fantasy football league.

10:40AM Scott: "JD Power ranked the iPhone number one for business users. Next up, ESPN."

10:39AM And there goes Oracle.

10:38AM So let's just take stock of the rumors right now. No backgrounding, no multitasking, no unobtrusive notifications. No copy and paste (yet), no MMS, no video. Really pretty minor stuff thus far.

10:37AM "Next up, Oracle." Next up, we take a nap.

10:36AM "Thanks." Applause, and Scott is back. Man they're moving a real speedy pace. So far, nothing really surprising at all.

10:36AM They're showing off a character buying some things in-game. Now they're showing media access. They're playing music off of the device in the game. Kind of cool.

10:34AM This looks pretty good. EA has been hard at work!

10:34AM Travis Boatman from EA. "Hey everybody. We announced Spore a year ago at the original SDK launch. The game we're showing off today is The Sims."

10:33AM Scott's back: "As you can see, that's a perfect candidate for iPhone OS 3.0." "Next, EA."

10:31AM We have a sneaking suspicion we're going to see some serious demo'ing of the push notification service. They're jumping into a chat. Ha! Totally making typing mistakes. Classic iPhone errors. Sire instead of sure. The crowd chuckled.

10:30AM "For the first time, Meebo will have a native iPhone app. Our goal is to let user's communicate with friends regardless of what network they're on."

10:30AM "Let's start with Meebo." We're going to see a demo of the OS 3.0 native version of the app. Seth Sternberg, Meebo CEO is up.

10:29AM "This is a big update for the iPhone SDK. Now, a couple of weeks ago, we called a few devs to see what they could do in two weeks..." Ah, this old gag! Should be interesting.

10:28AM "We're introducing a new API for streaming video and audio. And we're adding an API for in-game voice."

10:28AM "So, push. Preserves battery life, maintains performance, optimized for mobile networks." Well, there goes background apps. So much for those predictions, but not surprising at all. Apple wasn't about to upend their whole architecture.

10:27AM Wait, we've seen this graphic before! He's running through the basic push architecture. Very similar to what we've seen. Let's hope it actually happens now.

10:26AM "Here's how it works. Let's say you have an IM app. While it's running it's connected to your server. But, when you quit the app, you no longer have this connection open. That's where our push service comes into play." Yeah... this sounds so familiar.

10:25AM "We took a 3rd party Push notification system -- battery life only dropped 20% in the background."

10:25AM "We were asked, why don't you do background processing? It's bad for the customer. It drains battery. We've been testing this, and running some background processes on some phones. We took a popular AIM client, and we just let go in the background -- then we measured the standby time. And it dropped by 80% or more."

10:24AM "We expected to have this last year, and we didn't. There's a few reasons for this. Within months of launching the App Store, we had 1000's of apps. And lots of devs came to us and talked about using Push in ways that we hadn't even considered. So we had to re-architect the server structure." "Now, we're good to good."

10:23AM "Next, Push. You know, we're late on this one." Wow.

10:23AM "Now there is one catch -- bring your own maps. Due to licensing, we can't use those tiles in maps." So turn by turn is coming.

10:22AM "Now there is one more thing we're doing with maps. We're enabling developers to use core location for turn by turn directions." Again, finally!

10:21AM "So, Google Maps can be embedded directly into your application."

10:21AM Finally!

10:21AM "Next... maps. We've worked with Google to build an incredible app for the iPhone. But devs have said they'd like to use Maps in their apps. They keep asking us to build something natural, that can wrap our maps into their applications. We're making the heart of the Maps application an API which devs can embed into their applications."

10:19AM "They talk over the dock, and wirelessly over Bluetooth. Things like playing and pausing music, getting artwork -- or you can build your own custom protocols."

10:19AM "Now here's a class that we think will be really interesting -- medical devices." Scott's showing off a blood pressure reader that interfaces with the iPhone -- wild.

10:18AM "Here's an example -- an FM transmitter. With 3.0, the dev can build a custom app that pairs up with it, and automatically finds the right station and tunes it in."

10:18AM "With 3.0, we're going to enable accessory developers to build custom apps that talk directly to that hardware."

10:17AM "Next: accessories. There are thousands of accessories that work great with iPods and iPhones. Here's a popular one, a speaker."

10:17AM He's describing a scenario where you can share a contact in this manner.

10:16AM "We use Bonjour as the tech, and this isn't just for games. We think it's great for games, but this works for any peer to peer app."

10:16AM "With the new APIs, you can bring up a standard system panel which finds other touches or iPhones which are in the same app. You form an IP connection, and you can game together. This will automatically discover running apps, wirelessly over Blutetooth."

10:15AM "Next, support for peer to peer connectivity. This is great for games."

10:15AM "Free apps remain free -- you won't be asked to buy something in that app."

10:14AM "This is for paid apps only."

10:14AM "The model for in-app sales is the same as the rest of the App Store, 70% goes to developers."

10:13AM "This whole thing is tied directly into the iTunes store. When you tap buy, it brings up a standard iTunes authentication panel."

10:13AM "City Guide, you can sell the app, then sell new cities from within the application."

10:13AM Showing off a dialog -- a prompt to purchase an update to mag from within an app. Now a game. "You can purchase a game with 10 levels, then you can tap to update with another 10 levels within the game." Yes, with a nice, intrusive pop up!

10:12AM "But some devs have come to us and talked about other models they'd like to use. Like subscriptions. A place where you could renew that sub in the app. Some game devs have wanted to be able to sell new levels from within an app. There are many examples of that, like e-books. Like a bookstore built into an app. We supporting these new models in what we call In-App Purchase."

10:11AM "Starting with enhancements to the App Store. As you heard, over 800m downloads. It's the best way ever for devs to get their software out. It's also a great business deal. They can give apps away, or they can sell them. 70% of that revenue goes to the devs. And we cover all the fees, and devs are paid monthly."

10:10AM 1000 new APIs.

10:09AM "Let me tell you what we're doing for developers. Our goal was to make devs successful, we gave them the best tools ever. It blew us away what they did. We've spent the last year working hard to make the SDK even better."

10:08AM "I'm here to tell you about iPhone OS 3.0. This is a major update to the OS. It comes with incredible features for devs and customers."

10:08AM "This is something we haven't seen before, and this is just the beginning. We're only 8 months into this. I'd like to bring up Scott Forstall for a preview of OS 3.0"

10:07AM That's a high percentage, but you have to wonder (and we know some) what they've passed on. Plenty of good stuff.

10:07AM Applause for the video. "So clearly the App Store appeals to big and small devs. We've had an explosion of apps. Over 25,000." "We've had a lot of curiosity over the submission process... 96% of apps that have been submitted were approved."

10:05AM Apple is trying to show off how easy it is to get into app development on the platform. And... well, it is.

10:05AM Steve Demeter, creator of Trism. A little video on him.

10:04AM He's propping Gameloft right now -- they love the App Store. Go figure! "They've had over 2m paid downloads for Gameloft."

10:04AM "This has been great for devs. In one year's time we've had over 800,000 downloads of the free SDK. We've had over 50,000 companies and individuals join our dev program. And most of them, over 60%, have never developed for any Apple platform before."

10:03AM "We've sold 17m altogether, you can see how people have accepted the 3G. But the touch also runs the same OS, and if you look at the time period, we've sold over 30m units of iPhones and iPod touch."

10:02AM "Before we shipped our first phone, we set an aggressive goal -- we said we'd sell 10 million phones. And we sold 13.7m. We blew it away."

10:02AM "We're gonna show you some of future plans. Before that, let me remind you of where we're at with the iPhone. We're now in over 80 countries." Applause.

10:01AM "Good morning everyone, welcome to the campus." Greg Joswiak!

10:00AM And the lights are dimming...

9:59AM They started playing the "every day you wake up" ad song... but then quickly killed it in favor of Dave Matthews. Odd. Very odd.

9:55AM "Our presentation will begin shortly, please silence cellphones and pagers." Pagers!? Pagers!?

9:54AM There's definitely a feeling that this event is much quieter, more subdued. Everyone seems to be expecting the same thing -- and that's not surprising.

9:52AM Sweet -- Radiohead. 15 step! Things are getting herky jerky in here!

9:44AM Okay folks -- we're in our seats at long, long, long last. There's a little Coldplay playing in the background (of course), and everyone else is just getting settled. Expect some excitement in a matter of moments.

9:30AM We're currently at the doors, and we probably don't have to tell you that people are champing at the bit to get inside. We'll be knocking down old ladies and tripping unsuspecting humans soon enough, so stay tuned!

9:15AM We're on the ground in Cupertino, waiting outside for the big show to start. Hang tight, we'll be heading to our seats momentarily!