Liveblog from the 2009 WWDC Keynote

We’ll be blogging live from the 2009 WWDC Keynote (come on new iPhone!). Powered by Friendfeed, you can watch the news here, or head on over directly to our special group set up on Friendfeed: WWDC 2009 Keynote Group. If you have a Friendfeed account you can comment and join in on the conversation.

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New iPhone Coming Monday? We’ll Report Live From the Keynote!

Come Monday morning at 10am Pacific time, Phil Schiller will hit the stage at WWDC to put and end to all of the rumors about the next iPhone. We hope so anyway. I hope that a new iPhone, or maybe multiple iPhones, will be unveiled then. We know that at least OS 3.0 will be discussed heavily.

What features will the next iPhone have? Higher resolution camera? Video capabilities? More memory? There are so many rumors that it’s hard to keep up. There have been a few very interesting and convincing looking rumors the last couple days.

We’ll also, hopefully, get some more details on OS 3.0 and it’s release date.

I’ll be at the keynote on Monday and I’ll try to tweet the major announcements to our Twitter stream (@148apps). If Twitter fails under the load, we’ll move over to our Friendfeed stream. Scratch all that. After further testing, I think the best option is going to be a special FriendFeed group, set up and ready to go with details right here.

You can still get in on our Design The Next iPhone Contest with some great prizes from Griffin Technology. The first prize is valued at an amazing $210. Hurry up though, the entries close at 9am on Monday!

This should be a good keynote!

Philnote Disappoints Us — Just Like the Typical Stevenote Does

Well, the keynote is over and no significant iPhone news. No significant news at all, really. Quick roundup: new 17″ MacBook Pro, new iWork, new iLife, DRM free iTunes music.

The only iPhone related news had to do with other products mainly. First, there are some new slideshow formats you can sync to the iPhone from the updated iPhoto. Whoop-tee-do! Second, all songs in the iTunes Music Store will be DRM free by the end of this quarter (that’s March 31st to you and me). And there will be variable pricing (you know — all the songs you want will cost more while the ones you don’t want will cost less). And finally there will be a Keynote Remote app available for the iPhone. While these are great and wonderful things to some, to me it’s just meh…

Where’s the iPhone Nano? Were the case manufacturers just playing with us?

Where’s the notification service? You know, the one that we were told would launch in September 2008? The one that was in the iPhone SDK, then pulled? Where’s iChat for the iPhone?

But most importantly, where is MMS? Every $9 phone has that now. Why doesn’t the most advanced phone in the world have it? I bet that new Palm to be announced tomorrow will have it.

I guess we’ll have to just keep waiting for these things. Apple always does things on their own time schedule. But, come on! Please, Steve? Or Phil? Or anyone? Pretty please? Or maybe, I will look at that new palm? I wonder how many apps you can load on that device?

Macworld Expo – Show Us What You Are Working On

The 2009 Macworld Expo is just a week away and Tom and I will both be canvasing the place for interesting iPhone news. If any app developers or hardware folks would like to meet up with us while we are there and give us a preview of what you’re working on, give us a shout.

This will be my first Macworld Expo — I’ve been stuck at CES for the past 5 years. Tom is a veteran and will be showing me around.

We’ll also be very proud to announce the winners of the 2009 Best App Ever Awards on Wednesday at the MacWorld Expo. We’ll be announcing the nominees tomorrow with voting open until 1/6/2009 for the winners.

Will we see the iPhone Nano, a new Apple consumer product of some sort, or, as usual, walk away all disappointed with nothing but meager product updates? We’ll find out next week as the keynote kicks off the Expo on Tuesday morning.