WWDC 2010 - iOS4, iPhone 4 and more from Steve Jobs

Anthony Caruana
Tuesday, 08 June 2010 04:36

Your IT - Mobility

Opening to the tones of 'What a Wonderful World' Steve Jobs unveiled the all new iOS4 and showed off iPhone 4.0, updated iBooks with the ability to show PDFs as well as taking the wraps off the all new iAds service. Somehow, he managed to take a product that had been leaked weeks ago by Gizmodo and turn it into an event.

As is typical of a a Jobs keynote, he began by giving his version of a State of the Union, noting that an iPad is sold every three seconds and that the 'magical device' could even be used to pick up women! In what was an unusual breakdown of stats, Jobs told the assembled audience of developers and media that of the 225,000 or so apps in the App Store, there were about 8500 native iPad apps in the store.

The first announcement of anything new was a small one. Jobs said that with iBooks 'We're making some changes today - notes, you can make notes right here, new bookmarks, and a new page displaying your notes and bookmarks." A nice update although, frankly, it's a feature that ought to have been there on day one. Also, PDF viewing will be coming later this month. In other words, the new feature announcement is really a catch up on what users have been able to do with a Kindle for quite some time.

Once again, Jobs reiterated that Apple supports two development environments - the 'completely open' HTML5 and the App Store. According to Jobs, 95% of applications submitted to App Store are approved within 7 days. Of those that are rejected the app either doesn't do what you said it would or use private APIs that might cause the the app will break if a change is made or simply 'They crash".

Jobs made a point of letting everyone know that the App Store can be a significant revenue stream with the eBay app (which was released for the iPhone and updated for the iPad) delivering $USD600M of sales. The developer of The Elements made more money in his first day of sales than in the previous five years from Google ads on www.periodictable.com. In fact, Jobs noted that Apple has paid out over $1B to developers, who receive 70% of an application's sale price. That means Apple cleared over $420M for their efforts.

Apple claims that they have the number one online store for apps, books and music with over 150 million accounts registered with a credit card.

Being a developer conference, Jobs invited the creators of Netflix and Farmville to show off their wares. For those addicted to Farmville on Facebook, 'Farming' will sync with the Facebook version of the game. It's expected to be available in late June.

Activision's Karthik Bala was next to the stage and did his dog and pony show, to show off Guitar Hero for iPhone complete with classic rock from Queen and The Rolling Stones.