New iPhone & App Tools – btrax @ Apple’s WWDC

Job-less Keynote
In stark contrast to Steve Job’s largely solo format, Apple’s marketing baron Phil Schiller farmed out much of the presentation to three other senior engineers.

They also paraded no less than seven different App developer teams to showcase how their apps will use the new capabilities of the iPhone 3GS and iPhone’s upgraded operating system.

While appealing to the 1,000+ developers present at Apple’s annual WWDC developer fete, the presentation seemed a bit long winded – with much of the time spent on only incremental changes.

Some of the more substantial themes running throughout Apple’s presentation:

Not Quite All About Apps
Apple’s game plan is both powerful and straight forward: provide raw ingredients (SDK and APIs) and a buffet table (App Store and iTunes) to developers. App downloads passed 1 billion in April 2009 and keeps growing with 40+ million iPhones and iPods on the streets.

Apple’s gamble on entering the cutthroat mobile industry and prescient view of your phone as a pocket computer is paying off – the iPhone represents 65% of all mobile web browsing.

More importantly, Apple has created a seamless system were it maximizes profits while outsourcing risk:
• AT&T and other carriers foot the wireless infrastructure costs
• Content piped in by major movie studios, music labels and individuals
• App developers code and market software for both mainstream and niche audiences

Apple Everywhere?
Apple is tipping its global hat, accelerating release schedules abroad for its core products. Also iPhone OS 3.0 is built on a truly universal base – no differences in the code on every new iPhone despite the 30+ supported languages.

This doesn’t mean just translation of UI text, but full localization with different layouts for email input, etc. The new OS adds several new languages, most notably Arabic and Indonesian.

As Apple keeps reducing product prices, their potential market reach expands exponentially beyond the semi-luxury category.

Feeling the Economic Squeeze
The most evident theme throughout the WWDC keynote was price – every product covered had a price drop. The largest ones were for the MacBook Air (top end dropped by $700) and the iPhone 3G, which now will be $99 and sold alongside the newer iPhone 3GS.

Putting the iPhone 3G under $100 is a key move, coming the same week as the launch of the most sophisticated challenge to the iPhone yet – the Palm Pre, which we covered last week.

Photo by Tim Wagner © 2009