The Apple (AAPL) keynote Bingo game — brilliantly parodied in the famous 2008 IBM buzzword ad (pasted below the fold) — has become a fanboy tradition, although as far as we know nobody has ever interrupted a Steve Jobs presentation to shout "Bingo!"

Marketing senior vice president Phil Schiller, not Jobs, is scheduled to give the keynote at this year's World Wide Developers Conference Monday, but that hasn't stopped the Bingo board makers. We've come across at least two board generators, one from the Netherlands (sample board above), the other from Sweden (sample below).

Here are the links:

• Keynote Bingo WWDC 2009
• Stevenote Bingo

This exercise is not entirely frivolous; the game does give developers, reporters and other Apple watchers a chance to consolidate the rumors and share their sense of what Cupertino is cooking up.

The rules are simple: generate a board you like, print it out, mark the squares as phrases are uttered or events occur, and when you complete a row, column or diagonal, call out "Bingo!"

If you dare.

Tune in here at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) for our live coverage of WWDC 2009.

See also:

• What's Steve Jobs got up his sleeve?
• Analyst: Apple’s WWDC likely to ‘disappoint’
• Infographic: Color-coded iPhone rumors
• Rumor roundup: All about the new iPhone

Below the fold: the Buzzword Bingo IBM ad.

This is a live blog of the valedictory keynote Steve Jobs decided not to give — sending Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller to Macworld 2009 in his place.

Schiller's remarks began shortly after 9 a.m PST (12 noon EST),

Posts are listed in reverse order, with the latest posts on top. All times are a.m. PST.

The headlines: Expectations were low, but even those were largely unmet. There was no Steve Jobs cameo, no Mac mini, no new iMac, no Snow Leopard ship date, no memory upgrades for iPhone or iPod touch, no new iPod shuffle, no revamped Apple TV or Time Capsule. There was a new unibody 17-inch MacBook Pro with an impressive (if non user-removable) battery. There are new price points for iTunes music and 10 million songs are going DRM-free, if you are willing to pay extra for them. And iWork is making collaboration on the Web a little easier, but it's still in beta and it's no Microsoft (MSFT) Office — or even Google (GOOG) Apps — killer.

As one wag put it afterward, Tony Bennett got a standing ovation. Apple, not so much.

Apple (AAPL) closed at 93.02 on Tuesday, down 1.65% for the day.

Below the fold: The live blog.

10:37 And we're done. Phil Schiller thanks his staff, his family, and invites us to enjoy the show.

10:30 Ending with live music. It's not going to be Paul McCartney. No, it's Tony Bennett on a floating stage with a 4-piece band. "The Best is Yet to Come." He gets a warm applause. "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." Standing ovation.

10:24 One last thing. iTunes. 6 billion songs sold. World's largest media library. More than 10 million songs. Over 75 million accounts with credit cards. iTunes now the No. 1 channel for music in the U.S. So what's new? Three things. First: Price. Caving in to music publishers, starting in April, three price points $.69, $99, $1.29.

Second: Reviews what iTunes Plus does. Allows DRM-free music. Starting today, offering 8 million songs DRM free. By the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs in iTunes will be DRM free. Big applause. You can go into your library and update all your songs at once. (Doesn't mention what this would cost you.)

Third: iPhone wi-fi music store. Now you can also download over 3G networks as well. (Scattered applause.) Starts today. "This is really profound," says Schiller. The audience is silent.

10:21 Schiller back. Up to 7 hours with discrete graphics, up to 8 hours with integrated graphics chip. "Just as thin. Just as light." Take-back and recycling program.

Price: $2,799 4 GB  memory. 320 GB HD. Superdrive. Ships late January. Shows the TV ad. Battery is featured.

10:10 Finally, a piece of hardware! The 17" MacBook Pro. Quotes Jobs' favorite pet journalists — Walt Mossberg, David Pogue — talking about how great the new MacBooks are.

Specs: 0.98 inches thick. 6.6 pounds. 17-inch backlit display. 60% greater color gamut than previous. Glossy finish. Also an anti-glare option for $50 extra. (Applause.) Integrated battery connector. (Does "integrated" mean non removable?) 2.93 GHz. up to 8 GB memory. Both NVIDIA graphics options. 320 GB Hard drive. 256 GB Solid state.

Gets to the battery. Longest lasting battery life ever, but notebook just as thin and just as light. Clips Bob Mansfield. Up to 8 hours. More environmentally friendly. Dan Riccio. Made it bigger. Removable batteries waste a lot of space. By making it nonremovable, able to make it 40% bigger. Mansfield: Custom-designed. Unnamed chief engineer shows a manufacturing movie. Mansfield: adaptive charger. Up to 1000 recharges, more than 3X the old way. Chip within the battery that talks to each of the cells and adjusts accordingly. Claims 3X the lifespan. Mansfield: Greener. Free of "many of the harmful toxins." Lifespan extended to up to 5 years.

10:03. iWork.com. As predicted, its been updated to be more Web friendly. Allows people to collaborate on documents that are shared on the Internet. But — and here's a piece of news — it's still in beta. Demo: Hit a button and it alerts a collaborator — Tia — that a document you want to share that the document is available for viewing on iWork.com. Tia gets e-mail invited to view document. Launches her browser (Mac or PC) and she sees the document. She can read, leave a note or comment, and, if she wants to edit it, she has to download it. (This is less than expected. In Google's tools, collaborators can actually edit the document online.) Launches today. Eventually Apple will sell it; today it's free

9:59 Numbers '09. Table categories. Categorize by column — by baseball position rather than player name, for example. More functions — more than 250 now — that pastes into your spreadsheet with color-coded variables. New chart types. Trend lines, error bars. (More candy for the biz guys.) Links to Pages so that an update in a spreadsheet gets updated in your word processing document. And, naturally, more "beautiful new templates." $49 with new Mac, $79 otherwise. $99 family pack. Starts shipping today. You need Leopard to run these, but a box set that includes all three comes for $169.

9:55 Pages '09. Full screen view to focus on your writing and get rid of everything else on your desktop. Dynamic outlines. See your document in outline view, reorganize your sections. Mail merge with Numbers. Mathtype and Endnote. 40 new templates. Business cards etc.  Is this what Apple has been doing with its time?

[Will we never get any new hardware?]

9:49 No 2. A new version of iWork. Starts with Keynote. Magic Move, a transition between slides. Object transitions. Text transitions. Bush swings into Obama. (Applause, laughs.) Chart animations. Crane move in a bar graph. Etched metal. Stone texture. Zoom through wood texture pie chart. (Going after the business market, are we?) Themes. (Does anybody actually use these?) Keynote remote to run on your iPhone or iPod touch so you can control your slideshow with your iPhone, flicking between slides with swipe of your finger. Selling on iTunes App Store for $.99.

9:48 iLife 09 ships free with new Macs, upgrade for $79, shipping late January.

9:41 Schiller back on stage. To talk about Garage Band '09. Added new feature called "learn to play." Guitar or keyboards. Instructor up above, guitar in the middle, controls on the bottom. Plays a snippet. 12-bar blues in key of A. Chords A, D and E. Another snippet from keyboard: Hearts and Minds. Free: 9 lessons for guitar, 9 for piano. Also, Artists Lessons. John Fogerty. Colbie Caillat. Patrick Stump. Sting. Sarah McLachlan. Ryan Tedder. Norah Jones. Promises to add more along the way. $4.99 a lesson. Clip: Fogerty. "It was early 1968, the best as I can remember it…" (Audience laughs). Proud Mary, it turns out, was inspired by Beethoven's Fifth.

9:31 iMovie demo by Randy Ubillos. Inserts video clip with lots of options. Selects some sound from another clip. Drops audio only into other video. (The audience loves this.) Tightens up action and adjusts an edit on the fly. Gets a finished shot of a boy jumping in a lake from two different angles, with clean audio from only one shot. (Applause.)  New project: Safari. Shot from a jeep smoothed out using video stabilization. (Oooh.) Makes a gazelle pop out of the background. Slows a leopard down. Cartoon effects. X-ray effect. Aged film, complete with fake scratches. Adds maps with start and end locations. Get cool animated map with a red line zooming across the globe like the old Warner Bros. cartoons. Themes: five of them. Comic book, Scrap book, Film strip, Photo album and one more. ("Directed by Phil Schiller" gets a laugh.) Finished movie gets a big applause.

9:28 New version of iMovie. (Strangely muted response to that one.) Reminds us that iMovie was completely revamped last year, drawing complaints about some missing features. What's in it? New editing feature. New drag and drop feature. Context sensitive menus. Dynamic themes with titles, transitions, effects. Maps showing where you traveled. Video stabilization. (The audience has gone silent.) So he goes to a demo. Invites Randy Ubillos to the stage to do it. Big applause.

9:24 Now he's doing a demo of places. Adding locations to all his events. Seeing pins of every photo taken during a trip to Paris, up and down the Seine. Column view that lists all the photos of every picture he's taken in the world. All the U.S. photos. All the Calif. photos. All the Arc de Triumph photos.

9:21 Schiller begins a demo. Recognizing faces, confirming names, zooming in on the faces (applause.) Makes a smart albums of a whole family. That's faces.

9:19. Books from iPhoto. Travel theme with maps that includes geotagging info and pins on that page to show where photo was taking.You can also print on the sleeve and the hardcover.

9:17 Slideshow things. Assign music to your slideshow, pick themes from Apple's Muzak library. (My wife will hate this.) Slideshow somehow centers your faces. Demos some wacky transitions. Can save slideshow, complete with bad music and wacky transitions to your iPhone.

9:15 Also added to iPhoto: support for Facebook and Flickr. Tags the faces. Click facebook button and it sends the photo to Facebook with nametags. Your friends can then add the names of the faces you didn't know and the names get synched to your iPhoto. Flickr sharing works as you would expect. Includes geotagging.

9:11 Another new iPhoto feature: Places. Open and get a map with pins wherever your photos were taken using geotagging (if your camera has it; the iPhone does). Take a photo, geotag with longitude and latitude is added to your photo. Reverse encodes and determines that it's at, say the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. If you don't have a geotag camera, you can add the event location to a photo file. iPhoto then assigns a geotag to every photo in that Event. The maps comes from Google Maps. So you can zoom to street level. You can click on the pin and see street map, satellite image.

9:08. New version of iPhoto. Talks about Events, the feature added last year. This year, adding to events: Faces. Really powerful. Wouldn't it be great to allow you to organize your photos around your people. Corkboard with snaps of your people using face detection. Click on picture, name this person, face detect finds the face. Then the program tracks that person using face recognition to find the same person across multiple photos. You confirm or don't. Not perfect, but the best technology we've found.

9:07 Three new things to tell you about. First: an entire new version of iLife, iLife 09.

9:05 Today I'm going to talk about the Mac. 9.7 million sold last year, grew 2 x faster than rest of industry.

9:05 Stats. 3.4 million people visit Apple stores every week. 100 Macworlds every week.

9:04 Appreciates us showing up. "Incredibly exciting time at Apple." Photos of stores in Beijing, China; Munich, Germany; Sydney, Australia.

9:03 The lights dim. The music stops. Phil Schiller takes the stage.

9:00 The music swells … nothing.

8:59 Silence your cell phones.

8:56 OK, the room is filling up, although there are still large expanses of open seating.

8:40 The doors are open and the crowd, such as it is, files in. A lot of empty seats. My row is empty.

8:31 The media, however, are out in force, preening and strutting. Or maybe more like sharks who smell blood in the water.

8:24 The ground floor is nearly empty.

8:21 With less than 40 minutes to go to showtime, the entrance to Moscone West is strangely quiet.

7:55   Toni Sacconaghi, the Bernstein Research analyst whom investors love to hate, has issued a long report to clients this morning on the potential of an Apple TV box equipped with Tru2way cable TV, lending partial credence to Macworld Rumor No. 2. (See here.)

7:45  Analysis of Jobs' health letter, which dominated the Techmeme news aggregator Monday (see here), has all but fallen off its front page. Oppenheimer & Co., which had withheld its price estimate three weeks ago, has reinstated the stock — for now. See here.

7:30  The online Apple Store, as it is wont to do in advance of a product announcement — any product announcement — is closed for updating.

Meanwhile, for background reading, check out:

• Top 10 Macworld rumors for 2009
• Hoping for a Steve Jobs surprise
• What's going on with Steve's hormones?
• What's Macworld without its 'living legend'?
• Behind Steve Jobs' Macworld exit

[Photo courtesy of setteB.IT.]

"And this is exactly what we're going to try to do in 2008, our first full year on the market. Is grab 1% market share, and go from there." – Steve Jobs, Macworld 2007

There's been a lot of confusion about what Jobs meant when he set that sales target for the iPhone in January 2007. The giant screen behind him showed "10M units" — 10 million being roughly 1% of the nearly 1 billion mobile phones sold worldwide in 2006. But did Jobs mean that Apple would try to sell a total of 10 million phones in 2007 and 2008? Or did he mean 10 million phones in calendar year 2008 alone?

The timing question should have been settled once and for all when it was put directly to Apple COO Tim Cook and answered unambiguously: Steve meant calendar year 2008. (See the earnings call transcript here.)

But now a new wrinkle has emerged. The cellphone market has not stood still since January 2007, when Jobs gave the Macworld keynote speech that introduced the iPhone. Worldwide sales of mobile phones hit 1.15 billion in 2007 and is expected to grow to 1.28 billion in 2008, according to a report issued last week by Gartner, Inc. (see here).

So is Apple's (AAPL) 2008 sales target still 10 million iPhones? Or is it 12.8 million, 1% of the current worldwide market?

That depends, once again, on what Steve Jobs said and what he meant. You be the judge. Listen to the relevant section of Jobs' 2007 keynote, available here and pasted below, and decide for yourself.

The following is a live blog from Steve Jobs' keynote from the great hall at Moscone West. It started just after 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) and ended at 11:50 a.m. PT. Apple's press release is now available here; you can watch the event in QuickTime or MPEG-4 here.

The posts that follow are in reverse-chronological order, most recent first.

11:45 a.m. Wrapping it up. Steve Jobs just announced the big news: a price point of $199 for the 8 GB iPhone 3G and $299 for 16 GB iPhone 3G

The 8 GB is available only in black.The 16GB model also comes in white.

Will be rolling out in 22 countries on July 11. The price is max of $199 all around the world. New ad. Plays it twice. Introduces team. Tells the developers to go make some great products. And it's over. 11:50 am PT

11:34: Jobs has just introduced the iPhone 3G and is demoing how much faster it is. People laughing at how long it's taking to download a photo on Edge: 59 seconds vs. 21 seconds for 3G.

36% faster than Nokia.

Comparing to Wi-Fi. 17 seconds on Wi-Fi. (Which Wi-Fi, we wonder?)

3.6 times faster than EDGE on map downloading.

Great battery life he says. 300 hours standby time. 2G talk time 8 to 10 hours. 3G talk time: 5 hours.

Browsing: 5 to 6 hours of hight speed browsing

Video: 7 hours.

Audio: 24 hours.

GPS built in. BIG APPLAUSE.

Also data from cell towers and WiFi and now GPS too. Using GPS can do tracking. Demo driving down Lombard street (recorded earlier), tracking as you move. Little blue dot wiggling down the twisty street.

Third party: you saw the great apps.

More countries; we distribute in 6 countries today. We set goal to 12 or maybe 25. Colors in map in Apple red to the tune of "It's A Small World After All." African countries one by one. This could take awhile. Seventy countries over the next several months. Next time you're in Malta…

More affordable: $199 for iPhone 3G 8 GB.

11:28: Steve Jobs is back. Now I'm going to talk about the iPhone. In a few weeks, the first birthday. Photos of launch. Time magazine cover. "This is the phone that has changed phones forever." What makes us happiest is that users love their iPhones. 90% customer satisfaction. 98% are mobile browsing, from nothing. 94% e-mail. 90% text messaging. 80% using 10 features or more.

We have sold 6 million iPhones so far. Until we ran out a few weeks ago.

Next challenges.

First: 3G network.

Second: Enterprise support

Third: Third-party software

Fourth: More countries.

Five: More affordable.

Today We're introducing the iPhone 3G.

11:22 Schiller demo of MobileMe on an iPhone. Push e-mail. Invitation to lunch. Restaurant. Map. Menu. Save as contact. Pushed to MobileMe. Contact is already on MobileMe. Moves dates. Pushes them through the cloud back and forth to Mac and iPhone. Photos sent through the cloud. Applause. So that's MobileMe. Terrible name, but seems pretty cool. Service available for $99 a year with 20 gigabytes on memory (same price as .Mac, but twice the memory). It replaces .Mac. Available in July. You keep your .mac addresses. (Phew)

11:18 Demo of MobileMe on a Mac. He's very excited that a desktop-like app can work as a Web 2.0 app, as if Google apps didn't exist. Perhaps its faster and more responsive and better integrated, but we won't know until we do it hands on. Embedded Google map built into address book is cool. Move meeting around. Skims really quickly through photos. Resizing is also pretty fast. iDisk works like before, as near as I can tell. One button log out.

11:14: Phil Schiller. Mobile Me. "Exchange for the rest of us." We can all get push e-mail, contacts and calendars right to our devices. Stores your info in the cloud. Can get to it on any device: Mac, PC, iPhone. Keeps everything up to date all the time. E-mail gets pushed to all devices. Meeting change gets uploaded and pushed to all devices. If a contact changes, see it immediately. (What Exchange does already.)

Works with Mail, iCal, Address book. Also works with Microsoft Outlook. Built a suite of Web 2.0 apps to give desktop experience on the web.

Get e-mail experience that feels like desktop Mail. Navigation tools on top left. Contacts. Calendar. Gallery. Send to Mobile Me is a button on iPhone. Send photo to Gallery. Docs as well. Goes to demo.

11:13 Jobs: Something entirely new called MobileMe (the rumors were right about the name). Introduces Phil Schiller.

11:12: Jobs on third way to add apps. Called Ad Hoc. For, say, a professor and his students. Can get certified for up to 100 iPhones. The users download and sync through iTunes. Total three ways to distribute apps: Enterprise, App Store, Ad Hoc.

11:04: Steve Jobs back on the stage. New features: Contact search. Full iWorks document support. Also all of MS Office (added Powerpoint to Word and Excel). Also bulk delete and move. Also save images to library. Added scientific calculator (just turn to landscape mode). Added parental controls. "Some teenagers might not like this, but that's the way it has to be." Added many languages. Two forms of entry for Japanese. Also two for Chinese, one where you draw the character with your finger. You can switch between all the languages on the fly. "Better than having a lot of plastic keys on your keyboard."

Apple 2.0 free software update in early July (groans) and got price down to $9.95 for iPhone touch owners.

App Store. Unveiled in March. All iPhones. Wirelessly download. Automatic notification of update. 10 MB or less can download on cellular, WiFi or through iTunes store. (He never says when the App Store launches.)

Enterprises want another way to distribute apps so they work only on their phones. (Scattered applause from IT guys).

10:59: Scott Forestall summing up after all the demos. One feature request not currently in the SDK. Instant messaging client wants to alert you to a message when the client isn't running. Can't let it to run in the background, firstly because of battery life issues. Second: performance turns sluggish. Samsung uses a task manager. Big laugh at how complicated it looks. (Although we use the same thing on a Mac when it slows down.) Better solution: provide a push notification service to all developers. (Big applause.) Maintains a persistent IP notification through Apple. 3 types: badges (i.e. how many messages waiting), alert sounds, custom text alerts (like a SMS). It scales to many 3rd party services, but only one connection to the phone. Preserves battery life. Maintains performance. All works over the air. WiFi and cellular network. Available in September, but being seeded next month. Applause.

10:57: Last demo (phew): Digital Legends Entertainment. From Spain, just started developing two weeks ago, if you can believe that. A veteran game developer, new to platform. Ported game called Crawl (?) that is a 3-D game with caves, monsters, giants, etc. Expected to be ready by September.

10:54: MIMvista. Another medical app. Is this a theme? Moving through a CT scan and a PET scan combined with two fingers. It's like looking into a body in real time. Zoom with pinch and double tap. Scroll through slices. Change contrast or level. Measurement tool lets you measure, say, size of a tumor. Remove with a shake. (applause). Movie: change color and twirling a body that doctors could review with patient. Look for at launch of App Store. No price given.

10:51: Modality for med students to learn anatomy. Using medical illustrations to create electronic flash cards. Zoom into a heart. Unintended laugh when he says "imagine doing this on any other mobile device." Quotes student who said he learned 5 new brain terms while waiting in line for his latte. Going to K-12. Dozens of apps ble at launch. No price given.

10:48: MLB.com. Official website for Major League Baseball. New app called @bat. All games. Live ones on top. Tie score in Yankee game. Updates all the time. Added real time video highlights. Pretty impressive video, shown "minutes" after it happens on the field. "On Wi-Fi or EDGE." Hmm. No mention of 3G by anyone yet. No price given, but MLB is usually a subscription service.

10:45: Cow Music. Solo developer from British insurance industry who did this in his spare time. Mark Terry. App called Band. Creating music on iPhone. Piano. Drum. 12-bar blues in one interface. Big applause! Bass guitar. Whoops and claps. A few weeks time. No price given.

10:41: Pangea Software. Ported two games from Mac OS X to the iPhone. First: Inigmo (spelling?) Control droplets of water through 50 levels. Force fields, switches, etc. Hundreds of droplets bouncing like ping pong balls. Second: Cro-Mag Rally. Cave man racing game. Demos glaciers. 10 cars and 1 sub to choose from. Took 3 days to get each game up and running, or at least playable. The iPhone is the steering wheel. Turn iPhone left, the car goes left. 5-10 minutes to add in accelerometer steering. $9.99 each at launch.

10:39: Associated Press. Shows an update of the AP Mobile News Network it launched in May. Using new GPS chip, filters news based on your location. Encourage users to send photos from their iPhones directly to the AP (!).

10:36: Next up: TypePad. Largest professional blogging platform. Creates a post, blog the moment with a photo, or blog a photo from yesterday. Browses photo album, picks a photo, scales, chooses pix, chooses which of his several blogs, chooses categories, adds a bit of commentary, and finally, publishes. Free at launch of Apps Store. (Could this be leading to Steve Jobs announcement when it's going to open?)

10:33 Next up: Loopt. Where you are, where your friends are. Little yellow pin shows you where you are, blue shows you where your friends are. Pinching, dragging, tapping. Sees a friend a few blocks away. Can see what she's doing. Her pix, her messages. Messages her to see if she's free. Can give directions in one click. Location plus contact list plus information about local places means you never have to eat lunch alone again. Free when Apps Store launches.

10:30: Next up: eBay. Auctions on the iPhone, now the No. 1 mobile device on eBay. Home page shows what you are winning and losing. Touch on item, bring up details. Enters a bid. $180 for a Canon camera. Back in the lead! Next, a $12 million house in Mexico. Nice photos on golf course. He chickens out. Ebay app available for free when the Apps store goes live.

10:27: Forestall is about to bring developers to the stage to demo stuff they've done in 3 months with the SDK. First up: Sega with Super Monkey Ball. All four of the classic Monkeys! (The crowd giggles.) Showing how the tilt control keeps up with the player's moves. Applause when he makes the first goal. Price: $9.99 on the Apps Store. Applause.

10:26: Forestall is quoting from developers who have used the platform and the press, e.g. David Pogue of The New York Times, who hasn't.

10:22: Forestall is done. He's built an application that searches for names within a certain distance in his address book on an iPhone simulator. It's pretty impressive, but as I recall he gave this same demo three months ago. Oh, he's taking it one step further: compiling the code so that it actually runs on an iPhone, although he doesn't show that step.

10:19: Scott Forestall is going into an SDK demo. A lot of very tiny code on the screen. Some of the language is quite evocative. Like the "controller glue" and the "cocoa touch controls."

10:18: As far as I can tell, this was all announced months ago.

10:15. Video over. Next up, the SDK. Brings up Scott Forestall. The APIs. The framework. The kernel. Cocoa Touch. The core services layer. It's all the same stuff the Apple programmers have in house. This means a lot to the developers. This is what they were hoping to get exactly one year ago. Instead Jobs gave them a Web development kit that satisfied no one.

10:11: He's rolling a video of people praising the enterprise features of Apple 2.0. The Army guy gets a big laugh when he says his enterprise is like any other except people shoot at his.

10:10: Steve Jobs is starting with a general overview of Apple 2.0 software. So far, this is all a recap of the stuff he laid out at the SDK announcement.

10:07 A peek at Snow Leopard coming after lunch.

10:06: Record 5,200 attendees. 147 sessions. 85 on the Mac, 62 on the iPhone. 169 hands-on labs, 1,000 engineers on hand.

10:06: Steve Jobs runs up the stairs.

10:01: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Turn off cellphone announcement

9:59: Air thick with anticipation and reality distortion. Almost constant flashes, like a ballpark before a record is about to be broken, as people take pictures of the empty stage.

9:55: A rush of warm bodies as they fill the empty VIP seats with general admission. There are at least two overflow rooms for people who can't get seats in the main hall.

9:41: We're in.The huge room is as cold as a refrigerator. According to one green-shirted usher, it holds slightly more than 2,000 people. According to another, it holds 2,800. The press and general admission section filled up quickly. There are still empty seats in VIP.

9:40: The doors are open.

9:35: Buttonhole Walt Mossberg of The Wall St. Journal. "Do you have one yet?" we ask him.

He cups his ear as if hard of hearing: "What? I can't hear you."

I repeat the question. He repeats the same pantomime. That is code for, "yes I have been given a 3G iPhone for review, but I am under nondisclosure and can't talk about it." Or maybe he's just trying to leave that impression.

9:20: Leaving the comfort of free Apple Wi-Fi and getting in line. Fingers crossed.

9:00: A lot of preening and displays of feathers among the tech press. They have a whole hour with nothing to do but talk to each other. This is probably not a good thing.

8:48: News flash from the outside world: The Apple Store has posted the yellow "We'll be back soon" sign that signals the imminent release of new product.

8:45: A bomb-sniffing dog has arrived. She's a German shepherd and like all bomb-sniffing dogs I've met, she's very well behaved. Her name is Yana.

8:40: On the third floor, where the filthy press are being plied with croissants and fruit juices, there are lots of Wi-Fi antennas and not enough power outlets. I've parked under a column and plugged in. We're live again.

8:22: Apple staffers in green t-shirts gather in a corner like a school of tiny coral fish hiding from the barracuda.

8:20: Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!

8:15: Registration painless. Developers march by in phalanxes, munching on sticky buns as they are transported from breakfast on the first floor to the developer holding area on the second.

8:10: We're in. A lot of Japanese journalists with heavy video equipment lined up early.

7:54: VZAccess is misbehaving badly, and we haven't even entered Moscone. This could be tricky.

7:20: The press are being kept at bay until 8:00 a.m. It's probably just as well.

7:15: The doors have opened for registration and Apple staffers are tossing black T-shirts to the faithful as they file in.

7:00 a.m. PT: The doors haven't opened yet and there's already a queue that stretches around the block and out of sight.

Old links, soon to be outdated:

• What's Steve Jobs got up his sleeve?
• A collection of 3G iPhone spy shots
• Videos of previous Steve Jobs keynotes
• How to cash in on the 3G iPhone buzz
• 3G iPhone: Steve Jobs to deliver keynote June 9

The editors at USA Today, we notice, haven't waited for the actual event to put it in the past tense. Their Monday morning, pre-keynote headline: "It's presto, change-o as new iPhone is unveiled"

To set the stage for Steve Jobs' June 9 keynote, Leigh McMullen of Wired.com's Cult of Mac has done a brave and lovely thing: he's created a multimedia time line of nearly every keynote since Jobs' return to Apple (AAPL) in 1997.

Lovely because McMullen's tiptoe through time is so nicely laid out, generously annotated with historical video clips of Steve Jobs — growing steadily more wizened — as introduces everything from the 1998 iMac to the 2008 MacBook Air.

Brave because no good deed goes unpunished. Predictably, McMullen's labor of love has drawn nitpickers like, well, fleas.

"This is completely wrong," wrote JakePT on Saturday morning at 3:37 a.m. "The last 5 were not ‘One More Thing’s, neither were some of them the anchor of the keynote as you say in your excuse. The Mac Pro was NOT the anchor of the Keynote, Leopard was. The Air wasn’t really even the anchor of the keynote… You’re also missing the iFund from March which was a ‘One More Thing’…

Get the idea?

You can check out the time line yourself — and watch the videos — at Cult of Mac here. I've pasted a sample below the fold: Steve Jobs, clean-shaven and looking 20 years younger, as he unveiled the original OS X on Jan 5, 2000.

The World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) that opens Monday morning in San Francisco would be a relatively obscure technical gathering of programmers and IT administrators – with sessions on "Advances in OpenGL" and "What's New in Objective-C" – were it not for one thing.

Steve Jobs.

The keynote address that Apple's CEO is scheduled to give starting at 10 am Pacific Time (1 pm ET) is perhaps the second most closely watched event in high tech – after the opening speech Jobs gives every January at Macworld.

In the audience at Moscone West's main hall will be – in addition to thousands of developers (WWDC sold out for the first time this year) – hundreds of reporters, photographers, TV crews, venture capitalists, CEOs and maybe even a few celebrities from Hollywood and the music world.

What's Jobs going to talk about? To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns and known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we think we know he's going to say, and things we know we don't know. Here's a rundown:

3G iPhone. Except for a few short sellers on Wall Street, everybody who follows Apple assumes that Jobs will introduce a new iPhone that can send and receive data at so-called third-generation speeds. (In fact, so widespread is this belief that if Jobs doesn't show up with the thing on Monday, Apple's (AAPL) shares will get hammered before he leaves the stage.) Almost everything else about iPhone 2.0 are matters of little hard information and intense speculation. Is it thicker or thinner than version 1.0? Will it have a built-in GPS chip so it always knows where it's at? Will its price be subsidized by AT&T and the overseas carriers? Will it go on sale next week or sometime later? If these questions weren't still in play, there would be almost nothing to talk about next week.

The SDK. We know Jobs is going to spend some time discussing the so-called software development kit for the iPhone. We know because that's one of the two main themes of the conference (symbolized by the bizarre image of two Golden Gate Bridges that decorated the e-mail invitation). The other theme is the Macintosh operating system; presumably the two are merging somewhere in Marin County, judging by the doctored photograph. The SDK will finally give third party developers access to the platform Apple has managed to build, as Jupiter Research's Michael Gartenberg notes, without them. There's a flood of new software for the iPhone and iPod touch ready for release soon as Apple gives the word – including programs that will allow IT departments, should they be so inclined, to integrate the iPhone into their enterprises the way Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry is today.

.Mac. Even Jobs agrees that Apple's $99-a-year suite of Internet services (Mail, Backup, iSync, iDisk, etc.) needs an overhaul, if only to match the online applications that Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) now offer for free. By tracking crumbs of information scattered in recent Apple software releases, some observers believe Jobs is set to replace .Mac with something called Mobile Me, or just plain .Me. Probably the single most effective thing Apple could do improve .Mac would be to emulate Google and give it away.

Another iPhone. Speculation that Jobs would introduce a so-called iPhone nano – a smaller iPhone at a more affordable price – has faded; the smart money has pushed this back to next January. However, as American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu points out, there are good reasons to suspect that Apple will keep the first generation iPhone around, if only to have something to sell in those parts of Latin America – and parts of North America, for that matter – where where 3G coverage is spotty or nonexistent.

New MacBooks. Two weeks ago, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster put the odds of Apple introducing redesigned Mac portables next week at 60%. The other odds he gave – 80% by the end of summer – now seem more like it.

New Touchscreen device. Wu in report to clients this week said he's learned that work on larger, 4-inch and 7-inch multitouch devices has "gone beyond the prototype stage" at Apple. He goes out on a limb and gives 50-50 odds that one will be introduced at WWDC next week.

Those are the key themes, but there's plenty more to speculate about. If you want to dig deeper – in a suitably interactive way – come to WWDC with a copy of the 2008 edition of John Siracusa's Keynote Bingo card, pasted below the fold. The rules are laid out in detail at Ars Technica here, but they're pretty straightforward: put a token over a square if Jobs mentions the topic or says the word or introduces the speaker during the keynote. Cover five squares in an a row, and you get to stand up and shout Bingo!

Nobody's won the game yet. This could be the year.

[Moscone West photo courtesy of MacNN.]

How big is the buzz around Apple's (AAPL) forthcoming iPhone?

Here's one way to gauge it: track keyword searches using Google's cool Trends tool, available here. With this free widget you can enter one or a series of search terms and instantly get a sense of how often they are invoked over time.

For example, a simple request for the graph of searches on Google (GOOG) for "3g iphone" over the past 12 months yields the fever chart below (subscribers click here):

Note the gradual rise in interest as Steve Jobs' June 9 keynote approaches, which is not surprising. What is surprising is the fall-off in "News reference volume" in the bottom graph, a decline that seems genuine and not an artifact of Google's data collection methodology. (There is no similar fall-off in, for example, Barack Obama searches.) This suggests that, although interest continues to grow among the Google-searching public, the tech press may have developed a case of 3G fatigue.

Google Trends also shows you where these searches are coming from. Here's that data for the chart above:

Check out the size of that Hong Kong bar! How is it that an island with less than 1/40 the population of the United States generates three times as many hits? [Correction: Google is showing something more like searches per capita; see here. Still, there seems to be a lot of interest in the 3G iPhone in Hong Kong.] Let's zero in on Hong Kong's 3G iPhone searches:

This shows a sharp rise in searches that began in the middle of May, even before last week's announcement that Hutchison Telecommunications would be bringing the iPhone to Hong Kong and Macau.

Here's one final chart to put things in perspective. It maps 3G iPhone searches against RIM's (RIMM) BlackBerry and simple iPhone searches, without 3G.

Note that despite the recent uptick in searches for 3G iPhone, they don't rise to the level of BlackBerry searches. Moreover, neither can come close to the buzz for the original iPhone, especially when the device was launched last June.

There's lots of data to be gleaned by tracking Google Trends. If you find something particularly noteworthy or surprising, take a snapshot and post it in the comment stream.

Here's well-timed link from Andy Space at 9to5Mac.

With 19 days to go (according to my handy keynote widget) before Steve Jobs takes the stage at San Francisco's Moscone West for Apple's (AAPL) annual World Wide Developers Conference, Space has re-run a compilation of Apple keynote bloopers.

I've pasted the YouTube link below. Originally posted a year ago, it features cameos by marketing VP Phil Schiller (waiting in vain for a game to load) and Sony president Kunitake Ando (searching in vain for a word in English).

But the star, as usual, is Steve Jobs. See him wrestle in public — and keep his legendary temper mostly in check — as Macs crash, demos fail and a balky camera declines to yield to his command (and ends up getting hurled off stage).

There are worse ways to spend four minutes and forty seconds on a slow news day.

E-mail subscribers: click here.

UPDATE: Reader iSmashPhone from Philadelphia offers two helpful links: 1) Apple's own compilation of  Jobs' greatest hits and 2) communications coach Carmine Gallo's instructional video that teaches busy executives how they, too, can learn to Present Like Steve Jobs.

[UPDATE: Apple made it official on Tuesday with this press release. Jobs' keynote is scheduled for 10 a.m. PT.]

Although no official announcement has been made, Apple public relations confirmed to Fortune that Steve Jobs will deliver a keynote address on June 9, the first day of the 2008 World Wide Developers conference.

It is widely expected that Jobs will use that speech to unveil the next generation of iPhones, including a so-called 3G model.

"The launch of the new model is imminent," wrote Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in a report to clients Monday.

Munster notes that beginning Saturday, May 10, first generation iPhones were unavailable through Apple's online store in the United States, the most recent sign that the company is clearing inventory in advance of a new release. (Two days earlier, O2 ran out of iPhones in the United Kingdom.) On Sunday Munster called 11 Apple retail stores to check on their supply; five were completely out of stock and one of the remaining six had fewer that five phones on hand.

Munster also alerted his clients to the discovery, first reported over the weekend by MacRumors, of a switch in the latest release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware that will allow users to toggle 3G data ON for faster download speeds or OFF to conserve battery life.

Despite dwindling supplies, Munster still estimates that Apple will ship 1.7 million iPhones in the quarter that ends June 30. That's because he expects Apple to start shipping the new model in large numbers before the end of the month.

Other signs — including the release of the new Software Developers Kit scheduled for late June and an AT&T Mobile (T) memo canceling staff vacations between June 15 and July 12 (see here) — point to Friday, June 27, as the day the new model will go on sale. That would give Apple four days of 3G iPhone sales before the quarter closes.

"Net-net," writes Munster, "the initial surge of iPhone sales in June would likely offset the lost sales due to limited availability in May."

The drumroll has already started on Apple's (AAPL) website, where users can download a Dashboard widget counting down the hours before the June 9 WWDC by the days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Given the excitement with which the reinvention of Apple TV was greeted when Steve Jobs announced it two weeks ago at Macworld, it's surprising how little critical attention has been paid to the fact that the free update he promised to deliver by Tuesday has run into a snag.

The news was slipped into an Apple (AAPL) press release about the Macbook Air that was issued on Wednesday. Apple TV's second coming is now due "in a week or two" or "within two weeks," depending which paragraph you read.

Why the delay?

The update, according to the release, is simply "not quite finished." But that hasn't stopped outsiders from speculating that there might be more going on.

Could it have something to do with that awkward moment in Jobs' Macworld keynote when he went to demo Flikr photos on Apple TV and the giant screen went blank? ("I'm afraid Flikr's not serving up the photos today," he joked, but you know that inside he was fuming.)

Or could the hang-up be, as Valleywag's Jordan Golson speculates, some last-minute wrangling with the movie studios? If that's the case, a week or two may be optimistic.

I'm reminded of Daniel Eran Dilger's lovesong to the new Apple TV posted in Roughly Drafted last week, in which he praised it as "a full fledged, self contained media computer for watching and ordering Internet content" and bid good riddance to Blockbuster.

With the iPhone now running along smoothly at top speed, Apple now has the opportunity to fire up Apple TV as its fourth engine [of growth]. This time, the professional naysayers only have a couple weeks to disgorge their rivers of fear, uncertainty, and doubt before Take Two hits the public’s hands and shows up their analysis as the stupefying nonsense that it is. (link)

Apparently Apple saw fit to give the naysayers another week to two.