WWDC 09 Predictions">WWDC 09 Predictions

As I type this, there are less than 36 hours to go before the open­ing keynote of Apple’s 2009 World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence. The inter­nets are buzzing with spec­u­la­tion as to what we are going to see. I’ve read all the rumors, spec­u­la­tion and pre­dic­tions, and run them through my sophis­ti­cated bull­shit detec­tor, and applied my years of expe­ri­ence ana­lyz­ing the mobile indus­try to suss out what I think we’re actu­ally going to see. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. But I really don’t think it’s likely.

(and for what it’s worth, I think this is not too far from how it might go down)

I don’t think Apple intended for this to be a release con­fer­ence. I think even as recently as a month ago, they expected to have Phil Schiller make some announce­ments about iPhone OS 3.0 and Snow Leop­ard, and maybe announce the third gen­er­a­tion iPhone, which I think was intended to be called the iPhone HD. The actual release of the 3.0 firmware and the new iPhone would be in mid-​July.

The events of May and the first week of June have, I believe, changed Apple’s plans, and forced them to accel­er­ate their time table. Microsoft’s announce­ment of the Zune HD and the incred­i­ble media hype sur­round­ing the release of the Palm Pre, not to men­tion Palm’s sur­prise announce­ment that the Pre accom­plishes media sync by pre­tend­ing to be an iPod and using Apple’s own iTunes soft­ware, has, shall we say, fired the com­pet­i­tive flames within Apple’s Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and yes, Steve Jobs.

Check your iTunes instal­la­tion. Does it say it will check for the next update on June 8? Even if you just installed 8.2? That’s because it knows some­thing we don’t, namely that the new iTunes firmware will be avail­able right after the keynote, rather than in July. If you have a jail­bro­ken iPhone, restore it now, because you’ll need a clean instal­la­tion to upgrade on Mon­day. The 3.0 firmware will be pretty much what we saw in beta 5, with no big new fea­tures like back­ground processes. AT&T will offer to add unlim­ited teth­er­ing for your lap­top to your account for an addi­tional $30 a month.

More than that, Schiller (and maybe Jobs) will unveil the new iPhone Video, a name which has already shown up in some behind the scenes code. This will be very sim­i­lar to the iPhone 3G in size and shape, but will have a slightly dif­fer­ent face. It will have a 320×570, 16×9 aspect screen. push­ing the ear­piece grill fur­ther towards the top of the device. In many ways it will look like a “stealth” 3G, with a gun­metal bezel and a matte fin­ish black back. The front glass will con­ceal a VGA front fac­ing video cam­era for iChat to go along with the 3.2 MP aut­o­fo­cus cam­era on the back.

The iPhone Video will be avail­able imme­di­ately via Apple.com, and at Apple stores either Mon­day or Tues­day. Not sure when AT&T retail out­lets will get it. It will come in three capac­i­ties: 8GB for $99 with a two year con­tract, 16GB for $199 and 32GB for $299.

That’s a lot, and I think they’ll stop there. I don’t expect them to announce the iTablet or iPad or what­ever they call the Kindle-​sized iPod Touch we all sus­pect them to be work­ing on. Steve’s a show­man and he knows the first rule of show­man­ship: always leave them want­ing more. We’ll hear a lit­tle about Snow Leop­ard in the open­ing com­ments, which I expect to be released sooner rather than later, prob­a­bly late July or August. And of course, judg­ing by the ban­ners already hang­ing at WWDC, they’ll be play­ing up the App Store, and will show­case a few big name appli­ca­tions that take advan­tage of fea­tures exclu­sive to 3.0. Look for Doc­u­ments to Go and Bee­jive to fig­ure prominently.

Am I off base? We have 36 hours to find out. Josh Curry and I are plan­ning to record our return to Max­i­mum Geek Mon­day night, so be sure to check in for our analy­sis and other tech news hijinks.