iPhone OS 3.0 Announcement Next Week

Apple today sent out invites for an event on 3/17 to announce the iPhone OS 3.0 (I'm sure ours is still in the mail). Turns out that March 24th event that everyone was speculating about was actually March 17th.

Apple will likely announce the early details of iPhone OS 3.0 including the changes that will impact developers. We're likely to see an updated SDK well before the OS ships to consumers to allow developers to build and test their apps with the new OS. It's unclear if Apple will ship the 3.0 SDK on 3/17 or just announce it.

We're not likely to see any updated consumer facing features demonstrated next week. That would be very unlike Apple. Those Apple will likely hold of on and show at the keynote of WWDC.

The timing of this announcement matches up well with the time line Apple followed for the 2.0 release with the SDK announced on 3/6/2008. This was followed up with detail announcement at WWDC and consumer release in July alongside the iPhone 3G. This also lends some credence to the idea that a new iPhone will be announced at WWDC this year.

This announcement means that WWDC is a lot more relevant for iPhone developers now. There should be lots of talks on the new iPhone OS features.

What features do you think we'll see in 3.0? What do you want to see? Hit us up in the comments and let us know your thoughts. We'll have a wrap up post next week to talk about what was announced and how it compares with what you'd like to see.