And. It. Begins. The Next Generation of the iPhone

Steve Jobs walked on to the stage of his keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference at 10:06. It simultaneously brought a screeching halt to any office productivity across the planet. It was a day that had been anticipated like a big birthday, or a second coming. Over the next hour, Steve Jobs, and random lackeys, proceeded to showcase to all and sundry; all being those in attendance, sundry being the rest of us following along via a blog or live feed or Twitter.

The keynote naturally saw Steve drag out the big new announcements over the longest possible period. Straight up, Steve announced that the iPhone 2 would contain Microsoft Exchange support, straight out of the box. This was a big announcement, because it was one of the big holes in the original iPhone that kept it from being a real smart phone, and thus, from pushing in to the business market.

From then however, the keynote geeked out with information about how easy it will be for people to build applications for the new iPhone. They then proceeded to bring up developer after developer who were each given the opportunity to showcase their app for the iPhone. If nothing else, this showed that there will be a veritable bounty of applications for this new version of the apply-named Jesus-phone.

Twitter.com, the tech community’s biggest source of interconnectivity and communication, was finally overloaded at the hour mark of Jobs’ keynote. Twitter had attempted to batten down the hatches in preparation of this event, but bets were still being placed as to whether Twitter would make it through alive. It was a valiant effort.

There is a ton of new applications for the second generation iPhone; that much is certain. One of those is MobileMe, which essentially translates in to Microsoft Exchange without Microsoft Exchange. It will push your contacts, emails and calendar events to your phone, your computer, to each and every device you have that is connectable.

Steve Jobs made sure to try and boost the Apple shares with a brief stopover on how the iPhone has been doing over the past year. Whether someone had told him, or he had just assumed from previous experience, Jobs probably new that Apple shares had taken a hit. Halfway through the keynote, their stocks had dropped 7 points, or 4%, but as of writing this paragraph it has reduced to only being 1% down, and is climbing rapidly.

The big news items though were pretty much what we expected. Jobs finally announced, to rapturous applause, the introduction of 3G and GPS for his second generation iPhone. He went on to announce that the iPhone would be coming to a total of 70 countries by the end of this year, including China and Japan, who also received fantastic language packages, and Australia.

But the biggest news of all was the price drop for the 8GB iPhone, which will be selling on July 11th, worldwide, for $199USD (waiting for individual country prices), (16GB for $299).

Steve then thanked those heads of department that were there, and stepped off stage to loud applause. It was, on the whole, widely considered a long and boring keynote. That he made us wait until the very end for the big news was no surprise. That the developers got the most amount of talk time was, in the spirit of a Worldwide Developers Conference apt, but frustrating considering what the keynote was actually about.

So there you have it, the Jesus-phone, iPhone 2.0, 3G iPhone, whatever you want to call it, is on its way. Go queue up outside your local Apple store or Apple reseller; you’ll need it!

Posted by Josh Hill.