For those who couldn't make it to Cupertino, Calif., Tuesday, Apple (AAPL) has posted a Quicktime video of its iPhone OS 3.0 special event.

Click here or on the image at right to view it.

These recordings are always useful to pick up nuances and details  — including, in this case, a live duet on leaf trombones and a terrifying three-person shoot-out — that don't make it into the live blogs and press reports.

But this one is especially interesting because it's the first of these Cupertino special events that was not moderated by CEO Steve Jobs, currently on medical leave.

This time, Greg Joswiak, VP of iPhone and iPod product marketing, handled the introduction and wrap-up, and Scott Forstall, senior VP of iPhone software, did the bulk of the presentation.

So how did the new team do? Let us know what you think.

See also:

• Major iPhone upgrade coming this summer
• What to expect from iPhone 3.0
• What’s on your iPhone wish list?
• How iPhone Copy + Paste will work

Apple (AAPL) unveiled a slew of new features — more than 100 in all — in the third major revision of the iPhone's basic operating system. Among the enhancements demonstrated at a special media event at the company's Cupertino headquarters on Tuesday were many of the functions users had been clamoring for — in some cases for nearly two years. Among the highlights:

• Cut, copy and paste across applications
• So-called "push notification" — for example, of breaking news or sports results
• Multimedia messaging service (MMS) for sending pictures or voice memos in instant messages
• Landscape viewing when the iPhone is turned sideways in the major applications, including Mail
• The ability to search Mail, Calendar and other Apple applications for key words
• Improved calendar functions
• Stereo Bluetooth for wireless earphones

And much more. At the end of the 90 minute presentation, senior vice president Scott Forstall (who stood in for the ailing Steve Jobs) was rattling off features faster than reporters could type: Notes Sync, audio/video tags, live streaming, shake to shuffle, Wi-Fi auto login, Stereo Bluetooth, LDAP, iTunes account creation, YouTube ratings, anti-phishing, call log, parental controls, media ccrubber, OTA profiles, VPN on demand, languages, YouTube subscriptions, YouTube accounts, encrypted profiles, auto-fills…

"Many minor features add up to a major change," was Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's take-away message.

Apple also announced a raft of improvements — including more than 1,000 new APIs (application programming interfaces) — in the so-called SDK (software development kit) that programmers use to create applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Chief among them:

• Peer to peer connectivity (through Bluetooth) to allow multiplayer games with people in close proximity
• Support for turn-by-turn navigation and other sophisticated map applications
• A subscription model that allows micropayments by the item ($9.95 for an electronic book, say, or a more $0.99 for a more powerful weapon in a shooting game)
• The ability to interact with hardware accessories such as speakers or glucose monitoring kits

A beta (preliminary) version of new SDK is available to developers for free download today.

iPhone 3.0 with all the added end-user features won't be available until sometime this summer. It will be free to owners of existing iPhones and will cost $9.95 for the iPod touch. Some of the new functions — for example stereo Bluetooth and MMS — won't work on the first generation phones.

Apple also announced some App Store milestones:

• 25,000 apps available for download (the actual figure is now more than 28,000)
• 800 million apps downloaded
• 17 million iPhones sold through Dec. 2008
• 13 million iPod touches (for a total installed base of more than 30 million App Store-ready devices)
• 800,000 downloads of the original SDK
• 50,000 developers — 62% of them new to Apple
• 96% of apps submitted in February were approved — 98% within seven days — but still not fast enough to satisfy some developers

One user request that wasn't addressed was support for Adobe Flash, the widely used standard for online video and other multimedia files. Asked in a Q&A what Apple planned to do about Flash, Forstall ducked the question. "We have no announcements on that topic today," he said, suggesting that there were other ways to send video to mobile devices.

See Jon Fortt's Big Tech here for a live blog of the event. Apple's press release is available here.

Apple closed Tuesday $99.66, up 4.4% for the day. The stock has gained $16.55 a share in just over two weeks.

See also:

• What to expect from iPhone 3.0
• What's on your iPhone wish list?
• How iPhone Copy + Paste will work

Apple (AAPL) unveiled a slew of new features — more than 100 in all — in the third major revision of the iPhone's basic operating system. Among the enhancements demonstrated at a special media event at the company's Cupertino headquarters on Tuesday were many of the functions users had been clamoring for — in some cases for nearly two years. Among the highlights:

• Cut, copy and paste across applications
• So-called "push notification" — for example, of breaking news or sports results
• Multimedia messaging service (MMS) for sending pictures or voice memos in instant messages
• Landscape viewing when the iPhone is turned sideways in the major applications, including Mail
• The ability to search Mail, Calendar and other Apple applications for key words
• Improved calendar functions
• Stereo Bluetooth for wireless earphones

And much more. At the end of the 90 minute presentation, senior vice president Scott Forstall (who stood in for the ailing Steve Jobs) was rattling off features faster than reporters could type: Notes Sync, audio/video tags, live streaming, shake to shuffle, Wi-Fi auto login, Stereo Bluetooth, LDAP, iTunes account creation, YouTube ratings, anti-phishing, call log, parental controls, media ccrubber, OTA profiles, VPN on demand, languages, YouTube subscriptions, YouTube accounts, encrypted profiles, auto-fills…

"Many minor features add up to a major change," was Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's take-away message.

Apple also announced a raft of improvements — including more than 1,000 new APIs (application programming interfaces) — in the so-called SDK (software development kit) that programmers use to create applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Chief among them:

• Peer to peer connectivity (through Bluetooth) to allow multiplayer games with people in close proximity
• Support for turn-by-turn navigation and other sophisticated map applications
• A subscription model that allows micropayments by the item ($9.95 for an electronic book, say, or a more $0.99 for a more powerful weapon in a shooting game)
• The ability to interact with hardware accessories such as speakers or glucose monitoring kits

A beta (preliminary) version of new SDK is available to developers for free download today.

iPhone 3.0 with all the added end-user features won't be available until sometime this summer. It will be free to owners of existing iPhones and will cost $9.95 for the iPod touch. Some of the new functions — for example stereo Bluetooth and MMS — won't work on the first generation phones.

Apple also announced some App Store milestones:

• 25,000 apps available for download (the actual figure is now more than 28,000)
• 800 million apps downloaded
• 17 million iPhones sold through Dec. 2008
• 13 million iPod touches (for a total installed base of more than 30 million App Store-ready devices)
• 800,000 downloads of the original SDK
• 50,000 developers — 62% of them new to Apple
• 96% of apps submitted in February were approved — 98% within seven days — but still not fast enough to satisfy some developers

One user request that wasn't addressed was support for Adobe Flash, the widely used standard for online video and other multimedia files. Asked in a Q&A what Apple planned to do about Flash, Forstall ducked the question. "We have no announcements on that topic today," he said, suggesting that there were other ways to send video to mobile devices.

See Jon Fortt's Big Tech here for a live blog of the event. Apple's press release is available here.

Apple closed Tuesday $99.66, up 4.4% for the day. The stock has gained $16.55 a share in just over two weeks.

See also:

• What to expect from iPhone 3.0
• What's on your iPhone wish list?
• How iPhone Copy + Paste will work

UPDATE: To see what will and won't be in the new iPhone OS when it's released this summer, you can read our summary here or follow our link to the Quicktime video here.

- – - -

The first thing to remember about Apple's (AAPL) iPhone 3.0 special event, announced last Thursday and scheduled for Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m PT), is that it has been billed as "an advance preview."

That means no new software — and certainly no new hardware — is likely to be released to the public today. What Apple is hosting an invitation-only event for developers so they can learn about a new iPhone SDK (software development kit) and get a sneak peek at the third major build of the iPhone's basic operating system.

Steve Jobs hosted a similar event on March 6, 2008 — the "iPhone Software Roadmap" — at which he released a beta version of the first SDK and previewed iPhone 2.0. Both represented major advances over the original iPhone, but end users didn't see the benefits until four months later, with the release of the iPhone 3G and the launch of the App Store on July 11, 2008. iPhone 2.0 introduced dozens of enhancements (and more than a few problems), but the most important advance turned out to be the SDK and the tens of thousands of third-party iPhone applications it has since spawned.

So what can we expect from Tuesday's event?

Most of the advance speculation has centered on iPhone 3.0. Among the new features rumored or expected — but, remember, not necessarily available right away — are:

• Copy and paste. Better two years late than never, according to multiple sources. See, for example, here and here.
• Push notification. So Facebook, say, could alert you when you have a new message. This was promised in June 2008, but not yet delivered.
• MMS — Multimedia Messaging Service. So you can forward those pictures sent to you by friends with far less sophisticated cell phones. Maybe yes, maybe no.
• Better mail program. Why can't you search past messages? Read them in landscape mode? Delete them en masse?
• Internet sharing. For those times when your iPhone has access but your laptop doesn't. Apple and AT&T have both said so-called "tethering" is coming real soon now.
• Bluetooth support. Currently available only for phone headsets. Could be expanded to support wireless keyboards, speaker systems, file exchanges, syncing etc.
• Flash support. So you'd see videos and dancing advertisements instead of those little blue cubes. Adobe (ADBE) says its Flash Player software is ready and waiting for Apple's approval.
• Better App management. The current interface is barely capable of organizing 148 applications, never mind 28,000.
• Voice dialing and turn-by-turn directions. Quick, before iPhone users cause any more traffic accidents.
• Video capture. It can be done without modifying the built-in camera as iPhone Video Recorder, an application available only for jailbroken iPhones, has shown.
• A new browser. The current version of iPhone Safari is nearly two years old and starting to get a little long in the tooth.

Owners of competing smartphones snicker when they read these lists; Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile and Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry have had many of these features for years. According to one report, Apple's primary motivation for introducing the improvements now is to head off competition from the forthcoming Palm (PALM) Pre.

But what none of the competing smartphones have is an SDK that's as easy to use as Apple's or an App Store that makes marketing and distributing applications so painless — and profitable.

Which is why the first part of Tuesday's event — the opportunity for developers to learn about the new SDK — may turn out to be the more significant.

As Seth Weintraub notes in his widely circulated Computerworld blog, developers are going to need some lead time if Apple plans to introduce a new piece of mobile hardware — an Apple tablet, as he suggests, or a more advanced iPhone or iPod touch.

Much less has been written about what that new SDK might include (and most of it is pretty technical), but among the improvements developers are looking for are:

• Better syncing between apps. So those 28,000 applications could share data among themselves.
• Better calendar and t0-do list support. So an e-mail invitation could be automatically added to your iCal.
• More background operation. So you could check your e-mail, for example, without interrupting that Internet radio show you were listening to.

After that, the requests quickly go over this reporter's head. Ars Technica contributor Erica Sadun, for example, is asking for improved AVFoundation, CFNetwork frameworks, expanded UIKit objects and an improved Interface Builder (link), but we're at a loss to explain what all that means.

In any event, our questions should be answered soon enough. My colleague Jon Fortt will be live-blogging the show for Fortune.com, as will several other sites. (9to5 Mac says it will be displaying four live-blog feeds at once.)

We'll be monitoring the special event from our leafy backyard in Brooklyn and will post a summary of the key findings as soon as we know what they are.

See also: What's on your iPhone 3.0 wish list?

If you ever wanted a demonstration of Apple's out-sized power over the Internet chattering classes, you need look no further than the front page of Techmeme, the premier site for catching up on the hottest tech news of the day.

On Wednesday morning, Apple (AAPL) announced on its developers Web site that it was dropping the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that prevented iPhone programmers from talking about their applications.

By midafternoon, the announcement was the subject of more than three dozen published articles, with headlines ranging from the lyrical ("Ding Dong, the iPhone NDA's dead"), to the joyful ("iPhone NDA dropped, developers rejoice") to the psychoanalytical ("Apple begins to learn from NDA paranoia") — all gathered by Techmeme's automated news-picking software and neatly arrayed at the very top of its news feed.

The magnitude of the response was matched only by the narrowness of the issue at stake.

Before they were allowed to write programs for the iPhone, developers had to agree not to talk about Apple's software development kit or the work they did with it — not to the press, not in trade journals, not even among themselves. A few thousand programmers were affected, including some who had contracted to write books that could not, under Apple's strict rules, be published.

Yes, the free flow of information was impeded. Yes, software development progressed more slowly than it might have if programming tips and techniques could have been shared. Yes, the episode contributed to the rancor that characterized Apple's relationship with much of the third-party software community. (see, for example, here)

But did it require that every tech writer with a blog or access to a printing press weigh in on the development?

And was it the most important thing to be writing about on Wednesday, Oct. 1, in the middle of an economic meltdown and a presidential election, with banks failing and a $700 billion bail-out package hanging in the balance?

In the world of high-tech journalism, apparently it was.

Murderdrome is not Ulysses, Lolita or Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's a dark, bloody comic strip marked by the type of over-the-top violence that has made its genre so popular among young readers with a lot of pent-up rage.

But Murderdrome has now joined the pantheon of suppressed fiction as the first digital book banished from Apple's App Store by censors in Cupertino.

News that the work had been rejected by Apple was spread Tuesday evening by its publisher, Infurious Comics, which posted the entire first episode for free, along with a plea for support.

"PLEASE leave a comment," wrote the strip's creator, Paul Jason Holden. "We’ll forward ALL of these to Apple, so that we can ensure that not only Murderdrome, but that ANY comic submitted to Apple doesn’t fall foul of the same censorship." (link)

By Wednesday morning, the post had drawn dozens of responses — all sharply critical of Apple — and PJ Holden's cause had been picked up by half-dozen sympathetic bloggers (see Techmeme).

Murderdrome's most energetic defense was posted by blogger Mike Cane, who rattled off (with live links) several equally violent works of fiction published without fuss or warning on the iTunes store, including South Park, Reservoir Dogs and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Strictly speaking, what Apple banned was not a book but an application — called Comic Reader — designed to make it easy for comic book authors to publish their work on iPhones and iPod touches. But Murderdrome was the premier title, included with the app when it was submitted for Apple's approval. It was rejected on the basis of a paragraph in the iPhone 2.0 Software Development Kit that reads:

Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.

The language gives the company a lot of latitude — more than it probably wants. Rather than take on the role of Internet censor, and risk alienating some of its most enthusiastic and vocal fans, Apple (AAPL) might be wise to do what Infurious suggests: institute an e-book rating system like the one already in place on the iTunes Store for movies, video games and rock lyrics.

Meanwhile, Infurious has moved on. "Right now," PJ Holden told TechRadar, "the plan is to hold Murderdrome and concentrate on our other titles, which will be more Apple friendly."

And what about Murderdrome? "We're more than happy to resubmit under any ratings system that Apple suggests." (link)

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"

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.]

More

How much faster than the original iPhone will the new iPhone be?

Up to 30 times faster, based on evidence discovered in the latest software update. Poking through the iPhone software developers kit (SDK) version that Apple (AAPL) issued on Monday, programmers at ZiPhone discovered the word "SGOLD3" in the firmware that refers to the new device's chipset.

AppleInsider's Aiden Malley did some sleuthing and concluded this is a reference to an Infineon chipset, the S-GOLD3H (PDF), which, among other things, serves as the device's cellular modem.

The first iPhone used a predecessor chip, the S-GOLD2, which supports AT&T's EDGE network. EDGE is rated at up to 236.8 kbits over 4 timeslots, although benchmark tests found actual throughput on the original iPhone to be in the 50 to 90 kbps range (see here).

The new chip, which Infineon (IFX) describes as 3.5G, supports the so-called HSDPA (high-speed download packet access) protocol and promises throughput of up to 7.2 Mbps. That's 30 times the maximum 236.8 kbits throughput of EDGE.

Wi-Fi, by comparison, offers data transfers ranging from 6.5 to 20 Mbps.

In other words, in areas where AT&T supports 3G, the new iPhone could offer cellular data throughput comparable to an 802.11b Wi-Fi network.

Three days ago it seemed as though the world had finally opened up for would-be iPhone developers.

After eight months of pent-up demand, the pieces were in place to begin exploiting the new platform in earnest. Getting hold of the free software developers kit (SDK) was as simple as entering your iTunes name and password. The tools were powerful. The support was rich.

The programmers were "excited," Apple's PR department assured us more than once. On Wednesday, the company issued a press release to announce that an astonishing 100,000 copies of the SDK had been downloaded in just four days. Said Apple (AAPL) product marketing VP Phil Schiller: "Developer reaction to the iPhone SDK has been incredible."

Developer reaction today is somewhat more muted. "The twitterati," writes Erica Sadun at TUAW, "are reporting widespread disappointment and anger,"

It turns out that it may be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a third-party developer to get into Apple's iPhone Developers Program.

By week's end, almost everyone who had downloaded the SDK and offered to pay the $99 ($299 for enterprises) to become an official iPhone or iPod touch developer had received Apple's polite but firm rejection letter:

Dear Registered iPhone Developer, Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time. Thank you for applying.

What stings for the developers who got what reads like a pink slip is that they know Apple has already let its favorite partners under the tent. In addition to the companies that demoed at the March 6 event (EA, Salesforce, AOL, Epocrates, Sega) Apple quoted a quite a few more the press release (Intuit, Namco, Netsuite, PopCap, Rocket Mobile, Six Apart and THQ Wireless).

"The articles going around saying Apple is 'stalling for time,' implying that everyone is getting 'rejection' letters, are false," writes David Schroeder, who manages Apple support at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a MacRumors Forum. "Select developers and enterprise customers are already included in these programs."

One the bright side, he adds: "When June arrives and iPhone OS 2.0 is final and the App Store is rolled out, everyone will be able to participate in all developer programs. Also, to be clear, NO ONE has to wait to begin developing and testing their iPhone apps today. Anyone can download the iPhone SDK beta for free, and there is nothing stopping you from developing iPhone apps now."

Well, not quite. Despite Schroeder's assurances, U.S. developers have no guarantee they'll ever be accepted into the program (developers outside the U.S. need not apply at this time). Meanwhile, without Apple's blessings they are reduced to working on an iPhone or iPod touch simulator, unable to test the devices' touch screen or accelerometer — key features for game developers.

Besides, who wants to be the second — or 100th — developer to introduce a particular kind of app, especially when the first to market has deep pockets and an inside track at Apple.

"In other news," writes Daniel Jalkut to TUAW's Sadun, "it looks like the Jailbreak Developer Program still has open slots, and people are getting approved as I type."