Apple's (AAPL) fiscal year, which ends Saturday, finished on a strong note.

The company won't release its earnings for a few weeks, but shareholders can already see the most visible rewards — a stock that returned gains of nearly 45% over a 12 month period in which the S&P 500 lost 15%.

The last eight months were particularly impressive. The stock climbed from a 2-year low of $78.20 a share on Jan. 20 to close Friday at $182.37 — up 133%.

The stock's roller coaster performance over the first four months were driven in part by broad economic trends and in part by concerns about Steve Jobs' health. But its recovery, I suspect, had less to do with Jobs' return than with the company's underlying strength.

Below the fold: The year's highlights (with links to Apple 2.0's coverage).

• Oct. 14, 2008: Steve Jobs introduces new MacBooks (link)
• Dec. 16, 2008: Apple announces it is pulling out of Macworld (link)
• Jan. 5, 2009: Jobs says he has a "hormone imbalance" (link)
• Jan. 6, 2009: Phil Schiller delivers Apple's last Macworld keynote (link)
• Jan. 14, 2009: Jobs takes a medical leave (link)
• Mar. 17, 2009: Apple previews iPhone 3.0 software (link)
• Apr. 23, 2009: 1 billionth iPhone app downloaded (link)
• June 8, 2009: iPhone 3GS, $99 iPhone 3G announced at WWDC (link)
• June 19, 2009: iPhone 3GS launches, 1 million sold in first weekend (link)
• June 20, 2009: Jobs' liver transplant revealed (link)
• June 29, 2009: Jobs is "back to work" (link)
• Aug. 28, 2009: Snow Leopard launched (link)
• Aug. 28, 2009: China Unicom announces deal to sell iPhones in China (link)
• Sept. 9, 2009: Jobs returns to stage, unveils new iPods (link)
• Sept. 23, 2009: FASB approves subscription accounting change (link)

I was surprised Monday when Apple (AAPL) vice president Phil Schiller announced that there were 50,000 applications available on the iPhone App Store.

He was giving the keynote at the World Wide Developers Conference — a role usually played by Steve Jobs — and he used the statistic to show how far ahead of its competitors the iPhone had drawn.

In the bar graph displayed on the Moscone Center's oversize screens, the iPhone's 50,000 apps towered over the

• 4,900 Google (GOOG) Android apps,
• 1,088 Nokia (NOK) Ovi Store apps,
• 1,030 Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry apps, and
• 18 apps for "somebody else, I can't read it …  it's small," Schiller joked, referring to Palm's (PALM) App Catalog.

I was surprised, because I had been waiting for the App Store to hit the 50,000 mark — getting ready to write a post when it reached that milestone. I'd been watching Jeff Scott's automated count at 148Apps.biz — a source that has proved time and again to be considerably more reliable than Apple in these matters.

You see, Scott has a program that scans the App Store every day, counting the apps that are available for download and checking that number against previous counts. He can tell you — for any day since the store opened — how many applications have been approved and how many are still active. He will even send you, on request, a list of the several thousand apps that were approved but are no longer active — including such best-forgotten gems as I Am Rich and Baby Shaker.

I had checked Scott's site on Sunday, the day before the keynote, and I remember that the number of active applications was still stuck somewhere above 47,000.

Could nearly 3,000 apps have been approved overnight?

"These numbers are from this weekend," Schiller claimed at the keynote. "We looked up on the store."

Well, we looked the numbers up on Wednesday morning, two days later, and this is what we found:

Forty eight hours after Schiller made his claim, the number of active applications was still 1,657 shy of that nice round 50,000 mark.

There's no question Apple's App Store has a huge lead over its competitors. And Schiller is perfectly within his rights to ridicule their puny offerings.

But when you have that kind of lead — when you are a giant among pygmies — claiming that you are bigger than you are doesn't show a lot of class.

UPDATE: Reached between sessions at the WWDC, Jeff Scott suggests that Schiller may have included apps available in the roughly 60 overseas App Stores. But that raises other questions.

"One of the problems with the other app stores," he writes, "is that there may be the same app [that's] available here in the U.S. with a different ID due to localization. I'm leaning toward counting these as different apps, but it would be nice to be able to count them as one.

"I have a couple theories about why they announced 50,000 apps. They could be counting all unique apps worldwide across all stores. But my guess is that this would be more than 50,000.

"My main theory is that they just wanted to quote a big number and used that. After all we are likely only a couple weeks away from 50,000 anyway."

UPDATE 2: Sharp-eyed reader Alex Kynikos from Chicago notes that Apple's U.S. store — the one whose numbers they usual report — past 50,000 available apps on Tuesday, nine days after Schiller made his claim at WWDC.

See also:

For those who couldn't make it to San Francisco Monday — or who couldn't get into the event (it sold out in record time) — Apple (AAPL) has posted a 2-hour streaming video of the entire keynote. Click here to watch it.

If you want to learn more about the iPhone 3G S without watching the video, the same link offers a 13-minute guided tour that can be played on a computer or an iPod. It also offers links to videos about Snow Leopard and the new MacBook Pros.

See also:

• Live from Apple WWDC 2009: New iPhone, new MacBooks, no Steve Jobs
• Analyst: The $99 iPhone will increase sales twofold

This is the spot for our live coverage of Apple's (AAPL) World Wide Developers Conference.

The keynote started at 1 p.m EDT (10 a.m. PDT). All times below are EDT unless otherwise indicated.

3:05 And that's a wrap.

There is a new iPhone, coming June 19, about a month earlier than expected. There is a $99 iPhone, available now, which is not good news for Palm (PALM). There are new MacBook Pros and price cuts on the 17-inch MacBook and MacBook Air. And we have ship dates for iPhone 3.0 (June 17) and Snow Leopard (September, a month before Microsoft's Windows 7).

But there is nothing from Apple to compete with those hot-selling $300 netbooks.

And there is no Steve Jobs.

His name never came up and there was no news about his condition or his plans to return to Apple.

I would expect that to get a mixed reaction from Wall Street, and as the keynote ended the stock was trading at $141, down about 3.6 points (2.5%). (It recovered somewhat later in the day to close at $143.85, down 0.82 points, and climbed o.1 points in after hours trading.)

Below the fold: The rest of the keynote.

3:03 Phil Schiller is summing up the day's news. Will Steve Jobs be his "one more thing"?

Starts talking about the 129 sessions scheduled this week for developers, the 1,000 engineers on hand to help them. Thanks the teams that got this all ready. Asks for a round of applause.

2:59 Schiller announces the price points for new iPhone:

• 16 GB $199
• 32 GB $299

In addition, Apple is keeping the iPhone 3G on the market for

• $99 for 8 GB

That 8GB price starts today. CNBC's Goldman calls it "a huge shot across the bow" of Palm.

When does the iPhone 3G S become available?

June 19 in 8 countries (including U.S) and then rolling out to 80 countries. Plays new ad, which gets a big laugh.

[UPDATE: Apple has issued an iPhone press release, available here.]

2:46 Schiller introduces the iPhone 3G S for speed. (Yes, there is a new iPhone today.) How much faster? 2 to 3.6 times faster. Not everything is as fast. Average two times faster. Open standards gets applause. Built in 7.2 Mbps HSDPA.

Amazing features (most of which we've heard in the rumors:

• Built-in camera. 3 megapixel, not 3.2 as expected. Autofocus, whitebalance, exposure, tap to focus (big applause). Low light sensitivity better. Automacro as well, as close as 10 cm away.
• Also captures video. New switch that says still or video. 30 frames per second. autofocus etc. (No second lens for easy iChat, as rumored.)
• Edit from the iPhone.
• Tethering. Can share your iPhone Internet connection with your Mac or PC (if your carrier allows it; big laugh because the room knows that AT&T doesn't yet)
• Voice control. Hold down the home button. Commands you can use are scrolling by. Call Scott Forstall. What's playing now. Play more songs like this (makes Genius playlist on the fly.)
• Built-in digital compass.
• Accessibility features.
• Support for Nike +
• Hardware encryption (for the IT guys). Makes for instantaneous remote wipe.
• Improved battery life. Up to 9 hours surfing with wifi, 30 hours of audio, 12 hours of 2G talk time, 5 hours of 3G talk.
• Fastest, most powerful iPhone yet

2:44 Phil Schiller is back on stage. The anticipation in the room is palpable. Waxes on about how much the iPhone has changed things. Quotes latest Net Application numbers: 2/3 of mobile Web browsing is done on an iPhone. Chart of 50,000 apps against 4,900 Android apps. 1,088 Nokia apps, fewer BlackBerry apps, 18 Palm apps.

2:42 Forstall is back. iPhone 3.0 is free for iPhone owners, naturally. $9.95 for iPod touch owners. Available worldwide June 17. Free iPhone 3.0 gold for all developers.

2:40 We're on the last demo (the guitar amplifier app that crashed in mid demo). If we're going to see Steve Jobs and/or a new iPhone it should be soon.

2:08. Forstall on the some of the major new developer improvements (most of these we've heard before as well):

• In app purchases (e.g. magazine subscriptions)
• Peer to peer connectivity (for games, mostly)
• Accessories (glucose level readers best example)
• Maps. Embed Google Map services into your app. Turn by turn directions
• Push notifications. ESPN score alerts. Instant messages. Numbers (like how many messages are backed up). Sounds.

Invites developers to the stage. Some games. An impressive medical app. A bookstore with magazines and textbooks. tomtom for turn-by-turn GPS directions (with optional car kit). A Zip car app that honks the horn and unlocks the car remotely. A guitar amplifier app that crashes in mid demo.

Around 2:00 The blog ate one of the coolest improvements: Find My iPhone. It's available only for Mobile Me customers and may be the best reason yet to buy that service. If you lose your iPhone, you can go to Mobile Me and it will bring up a Google Map that shows where your iPhone is (as long as it's turned on). You can send a message to the phone and it will display a message and sound an alarm, even if you left it in silent mode. If you've really lost it, you can remotely wipe all your data (the IT guys will love that). And if you later find your missing phone, you can plug it into iTunes and restore all your data.

1:54 Forstall back after video. Now he talks about iPhone 3.0. This we've heard before. 100 new features, starting with …

• Cut copy and paste. Works with all apps, built in or downloaded from App Store. Undo gesture; shake and it undoes the last thing you did.
• Landscape and landscape keyboard to Mail, Notes and Messages.
• Speaking of messages, MMS. Send and receive photos, contacts, audio in real time over the cell network. 29 of carrier partners in 79 countries will launch around the world. But not AT&T; they won't do it until later this summer. Boos!
• Search: Search contacts, notes, e-mail, not just messages downloaded to phone, but also the ones back on your mail server. Adding Spotlight — a single location on homescreen to search across phone, including apps.
• iTunes: Can rent and purchase movies right from your phone (getting scattered applause because this was announced at the launch of iPhone 3.0.) iTunes U as well (this might be new).
• Parental controls: Added control of movies, TV shows and apps.
• Tethering: Allows to share iPhone's Internet connection with computer. Works with PCs. 22 carriers support. AT&T not on the list. Laughter because Forstall skips right over that.
• SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark: 3 X faster than iPhone 2.
• HTTP 5 streaming audio and video. (But not Adobe Flash)
• Auto fill passwords. (Finally!)

1:47 Scott Forstall starts on the iPhone. An incredible year for iPhone. Response staggering. More than 1 million SDK downloards. Now more than 50,000 apps on the App Store (not all are active, I believe.) We've already sold more than 40 million iPhones and iPod touches. On April 23 crossed 1 billion apps downloaded in 9 months. I'd like to say Thank you! To customers and mostly to developers. Video of stories from developers.

1:46 Serlet. How should we price Snow Leopard. Leopard was $129. Snow Leopard priced at $29. Huge cheers and applause. Family pack for $49. Available this September and a "near final" version available for developers today. That concludes the event on the Mac and Snow Leopard.

[UPDATE: You can get Apple's MacBook press release here.]

1:45 Serlet is back. Points out that Apple is throwing in Exchange support for free, while Microsoft usually requires you to buy a new product.

1:40 Serlet on fitting into business. How to get the Mac into enterprise. What was missing was Exchange. So Exchange support is built into Mail, iCal and Address Book. Just fill in email and password and you are set. Federighi comes back to demo Exchange. Lots cool ways to move stuff from calendar to exchange.

1:34 Scalet is back to talk about how Snow Leopard is taking advantage of advances in technology: GB of memory, MHzs of processor speed. Multicore CPUs. 64 bit. Threads. Open CL.

1:28 Craig Federighi, vice president of Mac OS, went over details of refinements. Lost an update.

1:23 Serlet is going over the refinements. Faster. Less space. Smarter cut and paste. Here's news: Shipping Safari 4 today for Tiger, Leopard and Windows (big laugh, applause.) 100% Acid3 standard (whatever that means. IE 8 is 21% standard. Included in Snow Leopard. Crash resistance in Snow Leopard. The No. 1 cause of crashes in OS X are plugin crashes. Now they are isolated.

1:17 Bertrand Serlet takes the stage to talk about Mac OS X in a thick French accent. Sharp contrast with Vista — gets a laugh. Microsoft has dug a big hole with Vista. Trying to get out of it with Windows 7. But the same underlying problems. Defrag. User account control. Same old technology as Vista. "Fundamentally just another version of Vista."

We are coming from a very different place. We love Leopard. We are proud of Leopard. Challenge to build a better big cat. Refinements, Powerful new technologies. Exchange support.

1:15 $700 price cut on top of the line MacBook Air. These are pretty aggressive price cuts, but they don't offer anything to compete with $300 netbooks.

1:14 That completes the MacBook pro family.

1:12 The 13 inch notebook also gets the new battery and the SD card slot. (The battery is not replaceable, I believe). Can also expand to 8GB, 500 GB storage, backlit keyboard. Firewire 800 slot gets a huge cheer. Also being called a MacBook Pro. Starts at $1,199. That's less expensive than the 13 inch aluminum that it replaces. Up to $1,499 for the top of the line specs. Available today.

1:11 Also new 17 inch with faster processor and $300 lower price. Both shipping today. 1:08 Still talking about the new MacBook. 60 percent brighter screen. Dropped the PCI slot, replaced with SD photo card slot. Up to 3.06 GHz Dual Core. Up to 8 GB memory. Up to 500 GB hard drive or 256 GB solid state. Starts at $1,699 (but not with all those specs). Shows a graphic with the breakdown.

1:05 Bertrand Serlet and Scott Forstall will follow, but Schiller starts with the Mac. Talks about aluminum unibodies. Insanely thin and light. Customers couldn't be happier. We don't want to stop. Showing brand new version of 15 inch MacBook Pro. Unibody. New battery lithium polymer, like 17 inch pro. Up to 7 hours of battery life. 1,000 recharges vs. 300. Five years of life before diminshed battery life — longer than most laptops live.

1:03 Phil Schiller takes the stage. 5,200 developers. Chart of OS X users to 2007. Over the last two years, has to change the scale of the chart (a la Al Gore). Tripled installed base. No wonder everyone is trying to race behind us.

1:00 Apple all rights reserved sign. John Hodgman, the PC guy tries to wsh the developers welcome. Can't quite get it out.

12:57 "Please silence all cellphones and pagers."

12:51 Video cameras are sweeping the crowd and projecting selected images on the giant screens. The crowd watches, looking for their own faces and waving to the cameras like fans at Yankee Stadium.

12:45 Apple shares are down 3 points (2.14%). Sell on the buzz?

12:40 The developers arrive. They jostle for seats.

12:35 The big metal doors to the great hall open like the last scene of Close Encounters, as TIME's Josh Quittner puts it. You almost expect an unearthly light to shine from within. Rock music blares out. The press rushes forward. The TV crews occupy a platform at stage right.  The room is dominated by three giant grey screens with the big white Apple logo.

12:10 The Apple Store is down, the universal signal that new products are about to be announced.

12:00 With a full hour to wait, the sound of the press eating and greeting and trying to impress has risen to a dull roar.

11:30 There's a long slow line for media registration. I count 52 filthy press ahead of me and another dozen behind. The PR woman who told us to come at 11:30 (8:30 PDT) takes pity and slips a few of us clip-on media badges. As the escalator carries us toward the third floor I count 70 media types still waiting in line. This is as big — if not a bigger –  media turnout as I have seen at a WWDC. They have not come today to see Phil Schiller.

A herd of developers is penned in a second floor hallway behind black crowd-control belts.

11:27 Meet CNBC's Jim Goldman outside the press entrance chatting with Apple's top two PR people. He's shorter than he looks on camera.

11:25 Heading back to Moscone. The developer line is no shorter and has now slowed to a crawl.

11:00 Parked at the 4th St. Starbucks. The developers are still streaming by the window.

10:43 There's a tangle of TV equipment parked outside the press entrance, just in case Steve Jobs shows up and walks in the front door. A newswoman from Fox Business is describing the things she "knows" about the iPhone that she assumes is going to be introduced today. "This is huge!" she says.

10:40 A software hawker at the corner of 4th and Howard tells me they opened the doors to Moscone West at about 10:30. The developers stream by, many of them looking for their apps among the hundreds pasted on the windows.

10:30 The keynote is two and a half hours away, but the line of pre-registered developers stretches up 4th St., down Minna St., and as far as I can see toward 5th St. As Microsoft's (MSFT) Steve Balmer might put it, "Developers! Developers! Developers!"

- – -

Some 5,000 Apple developers have descended on San Francisco for five days of demonstrations, technical sessions and hands-on training, but the keynote — traditionally given by CEO Steve Jobs — is headliner and usually packs the Moscone Center main hall.

This year, with Jobs on medical leave, marketing vice president Phil Schiller and a team of Apple execs are scheduled to lead things off, but a surprise appearance by the ailing CEO cannot be ruled out.

The theme this year is software: Mac OS X Snow Leopard and iPhone 3.0 (hence all the oversized app icons pasted like subway graffti on Moscone West's ground floor windows).

"One year later. Light-years ahead," reads a banner above the registration tables that manages to mix a metaphor (time and distance) and get the dates wrong — unless of course the "one year" refers to the 2008 unveiling of the iPhone 3G and is promising a similar unveiling at WWDC 2009.

If there is to be a grand unveiling, who will do the honors? When we know, you'll know.

See also:

• Apple WWDC keynote Bingo!
• 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

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.

Apple's (AAPL) biggest showcase event of the year opens in San Francisco on Monday and it could go one of two ways.

• WWDC 2009 could be precisely what Apple's press release said it would be: a conference designed to bring developers up to speed on the company's two most important software platforms — Mac OS X Snow Leopard and iPhone 3.0.

• Or it could be what the speculators who have run up Apple's stock this week are anticipating: the second coming of CEO Steve Jobs — returned to health and Apple's helm after a six-month medical leave — to take the stage and unveil the latest iPhone.

The smart money is betting …

… well, the truth is the smart money doesn't know. For every plugged-in analyst and media bigfoot who implies that he's been tipped off that Jobs and the new iPhone will be there on Monday there's another who says Jobs is as likely to wait a few weeks until his scheduled return at the end of June.

If the thousands of developers and Apple watchers headed for San Francisco's Moscone Center are feeling a little manipulated right now, maybe that's because they are.

I sense the heavy hand of Steve Jobs behind all this. Nobody plays the expectations game — and the press — more deliberately than he. And I suspect he's been keeping his options open.

It could be that he doesn't want to distract attention from the new software platforms. Or that he wants to clear some more old iPhones out of inventory before releasing the new. Or that he has come to prefer introducing new products at single-purpose special events.

My guess is that Jobs is watching the launch of the Palm (PALM) Pre — a device financed, designed and promoted by former Apple execs — and waiting for his cue.

If he thinks it serves his purpose, he'll send Phil Schiller, his marketing vice president and perennial second banana, out on stage to give a keynote that he knows will disappoint.

Or he could seize the moment — and the captive audience — and step once more into the bright hot center of the reality distortion field.

To find out which it is, tune in here on Monday. We'll be covering the World Wide Developers Conference keynote live starting at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT).

See also:

• The Pre’s soggy debut
• Report: Steve Jobs “was one real sick guy”
• Analyst: Apple’s WWDC likely to ‘disappoint’
• Rumor roundup: All about the new iPhone

Friday's Wall Street Journal carries a report on the state of Steve Jobs' health that makes his condition last January — before he went on a six month medical leave — sound more desperate than Apple (AAPL) let on at the time.

"He was one real sick guy," an unnamed source told the Journal. "Fundamentally he was starving to death over a nine-month period. He couldn't digest protein. [But] he took corrective action."

According to this source — who is said to have seen Apple's CEO in recent weeks — Jobs' recovery "is coming along" and he should be able to return to work before the end of June, as scheduled.

The same source says that some Apple directors have been getting weekly updates on Jobs' health from his physician.

Jobs has come to Apple headquarters occasionally since his medical leave began, according to the Journal. Independently, the Italian website setteB.IT reported last week that several people spotted Jobs entering the main gate of the Apple Campus on May 27 to attend a meeting.

A few days earlier, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told another Journal reporter that Jobs sounded "healthy, energetic" when he spoke to him by telephone.

The Journal's latest report comes four days before Apple's annual World Wide Developers Conference. The keynote at last year's WWDC — the last delivered by Jobs — was the first time he appeared in public looking dangerously thin. He skipped MacWorld this year, and his marketing vice president Phil Schiller is scheduled to deliver the keynote next week.

The Journal also reported on speculation that Jobs might make a surprise appearance during the presentation next Monday, but didn't reach any conclusion.

Apple has not returned a request for comment.

Given the rumors and high expectations, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster fears the World Wide Developers Conference that Apple (AAPL) is hosting next week in San Francisco could be a "slight disappointment" to investors.

In a note to clients issued early Thursday, Munster writes that he hasn't lost faith in Apple's long-term plan to drive iPhone sales by adding new models, lowering prices and entering new markets (e.g. China).

He's just worried that it's not going to happen the way The Street expects. Specifically:

• Apple is widely expected to unveil a new iPhone next week. Munster is cautious. "Regardless of whether or not new iPhones are announced at WWDC," he writes, "we continue to expect a mid-July launch of a family of iPhones."
• Many investors are looking for Apple to announce a $99 iPhone and a cheaper data plan. Munster thinks $149 is a more likely price point and puts the chances of AT&T (T) offering reduced data fees at about 25%.
• As for Steve Jobs, Munster is neither a pessimist nor an optimist. He doesn't believe Apple's CEO will take the stage on Monday, but he has faith that Jobs will return from his medical leave, as promised, before the end of June.
• And as for OS X Snow Leopard, billed as one of the highlights of this year's WWDC (along with the iPhone 3.0 software), Munster worries that the "near-final release" will have "limited wow-factor" and that the demo "may be disappointing."

In a separate note, Oppenheimer's Yair Reiner writes that he expects Apple to delay the announcement of new iPhones for a few weeks to work through channel inventory of old phones and to avoid "diluting" next week's focus on Snow Leopard and iPhone 3.0.

Munster is sticking with his price target of $180 a share. Reiner has raised his to $160 from $140.

Whether a new iPhone will be unveiled at Apple's (AAPL) World Wide Developers Conference — which begins a week from today — is still an open question, but all the signs of an impending announcement are now in place.

Two weeks ago, we got specs and spot shortages (see here). Last week the leaked photos started showing up. The provenance of none of them is certain, but neither has any been shown to be a forgery. And at least one veteran Apple watcher says the latest batch "look very real" to him.

Last week's leaks began Wednesday when China Ontrade, a Hong Kong-based vendor, released pictures (and prices) of what they claimed were parts for the "3gen 2009" iPhone: an inner bezel and what appears to be an LCD screen with slightly different markings than the iPhone 3G's. The first photograph suggested that the new iPhone would have the same shape and dimensions as the old — with black instead of silver trim — and the second seemed to put the lie to the rumor that the new iPhone would sport an organic LED screen. See below:

Two days later MacRumors leaked a photo showing the backs of two iPhones, one shiny black like the current Phone 3G, the other matte black and presumably representing the new 2009 model. MacRumors didn't say where the photo came from, and couldn't vouch for their authenticity, but it noted that the matte black finish was consistent with a photo released in February with a mysterious new model number: A1303. See below:

But the most interesting leaks, so far at least, are the blurry photos and screengrabs posted Saturday at 3 a.m. local time by a Chinese website called UMPC Fever, since overwhelmed by the ensuing traffic (MacRumors' translation here).

"It's already 3am, and I totally cannot sleep," writes the anonymous poster. "I just came home after meeting a friend from the U.S. This friend brought me something, and it's not H1N1. Instead, it is a item that will be under the world's spotlights — a third generation iPhone prototype. This friend is a mysterious person. Even this 3rd Gen iPhone is also very mysterious. He said one can only take fuzzy snapshots of it, and not clear shots. 'Cuz it's still not officially released. So, in regards to the fuzzy photos below, I apologize!"

The shape of the device is hard to make out in the one photograph — apparently shot in a parked car — that shows it from the outside.  (See above.)

More informative are the screengrabs that show several features that not available on the iPhone 3G, including a compass, multimedia messaging, horizontal typing, built-in video and voice recording and — perhaps best of all — a nifty autofocus feature on the new higher-res camera that allows you to select what you are focusing on by moving a little blue square with your finger.

The autofocus feature is shown in the photo below, along with a side-by-side comparison of photos shot with the old 2 megapixel camera and the new 3.2 megapixel model.

The rest of the UMPC Fever photos below the fold.

See also:

• Rumor roundup: All about the new iPhone
• Steve Jobs, new iPhone coming in late June – analyst

Reading between the lines of an Apple (AAPL) press release issued early Wednesday, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster believes the company has lined up two important events for the end of June: The return of CEO Steve Jobs and the unveiling of the next generation iPhone.

What Apple announced was that the keynote address for this year's World Wide Developers Conference will be delivered by marketing vice president Phil Schiller on June 8 and will focus not on new hardware but on software that Apple has been talking about for months: iPhone 3.0 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

In fact, Snow Leopard was introduced by a shockingly gaunt Steve Jobs at last year's WWDC keynote; it was his appearance at that event that first raised questions about his health.

Jobs is half-way through the fifth month of a six-month medical leave, and the announcement that Schiller will be delivering this year's keynote in his place seems to have put an end to speculation that he might be come back a few weeks early.

"Although this may raise some concern among investors that Steve Jobs will not return [at all]," wrote Munster, "we continue to expect his return to the company by the end of June."

Munster points out that for Jobs to deliver a keynote address in less than a month, he would have had to have begun preparation well before his intended return date. The analyst believes Jobs may return to Apple with a reduced role, possibly as chairman, with COO Tim Cook assuming the CEO position.

Munster also sought to reassure investors who had hoped that the successor to the iPhone 3G might be unveiled at the June 8 keynote. Instead, he expects Apple to schedule a second event, jam-packed with news:

"We expect Apple to host a special event in late June or early July to launch a family of iPhones. We continue to expect multiple models, possibly a high-end iPhone with improved specs from the current version and a low-end version with lower capacity and fewer features along with a reduced pricing plan. Such a model could also be used in Apple's launch of the iPhone into China as soon as the end of summer '09.

Apple shares fell 3.97% Tuesday in advance of any significant company news and another 3.96% after the news on Wednesday.

This year's WWDC runs from June 8 – 12 and will be held, as usual, in San Francisco's Moscone Center. Thanks to intense developer interest in both the iPhone and the new Mac OS, this year's event sold out in record time.