RSS Feeds
|
US Edition
Babblebaby
|
Defamer
|
Gizmodo
|
Kotaku
|
Lifehacker
We're here at Sony's E3 press event, preparing for the onslaught of hardware and software news they've got planned for today. Could there be a price cut? A new WiiMote-like peripheral? Just new games? Just old games? Whatever it is, it's going to be shown on the giant stage full of Sony's TVs. It's about to start, so keep refreshing so you can see the exciting Sony-ness. Sony-osity. Sony-manium. Update: It's started!
Mark and I are down at the Kodak Theatre for Nintendo's E3 press event. It starts at 9:00 AM PDT, with Miyamoto and pals showing off whatever's going to be sold out at Gamestops around the country for the rest of the year. Mark's prediction: a bundled Wii Sports 2 that comes with the new Wii MotionPlus controller. Jason's prediction: a new Nintendo DS motion adaptor and/or redesign and/or new colour. The liveblog will be here, so bookmark and check back frequently. Update: It's started!
We're here in LA and liveblogging the Microsoft presser today at 10:30 PDT. Mark Wilson and I will be covering the hell out of the hardware announcements, but if you're interested in the new game announcements, Kotaku will be the place to go. What announcements will there be? A motion-controlled interface? A karaoke controller? We'll find out soon. The liveblog will be here, in this post, so bookmark it and keep checking back! Update: It's started. Update 2: Lots of good news like new Xbox Dashboard.
Thanks to everyone who stayed up late to follow the liveblog. It's been a big day (night), so we'll make sure we have a closer look at all the happenings over the next few hours.
Steve Jobs wants the iPhone teams to stand up so everyone can give them a round of applause.
Two guys carrying badges carrying a metal box into a locked room, then taking the 3G iPhone out of it. Super neat.
July 11 will be the worldwide rollout date. They've got a new ad.
That's it for the fourth problem. How about "more affordable?" An 8GB iPhone started at $599, went to $399, and now is going to sell at $199. (Steve makes a BOOM sound not with his mouth, but with the video). The 8GB model is going to be $199, 16GB will be $299. There's also going to be a white model. WHITE.
Apple will roll out the iPhone 3G in 70 countries in the next several months.
It's taking forever coloring every single small country in Europe like this. Spain is included, which makes Jesus (Diaz) happy. Lots of African countries now too, as well as Japan. NOT CHINA OR RUSSIA, surprisingly.
How about more countries? They've got 6 countries today, and are expanding to a bunch of countries that I won't type out right now because it's going too fast. He's playing the small world theme. Mexico and Canada are covered, as well as almost all countries in South America.
The second problem gets tackled by Microsoft Exchange and Cisco VPN and various other feature support. Third party applications and SDK takes care of the third issue.
GPS is built in. Location services "is going to be a really big deal." "It's gonna explode." They get location data from cell towers, Wi-Fi and GPS. Using GPS data, they can do tracking.jobs is showing someone driving down Lombard street--that really squiggly street in SF--and the dot for his location squiggles around as he's driving (it's a recorded video).
"We're doing this with great battery life." The 3G iPhone's standby is 300 hours. 2G talk time is up to 10 hours from 8 hours. 3G talk time is 5 hours. (Jobs says other phones have about 3 hours.) Browsing, 5-6 hours of 3G browsing. Video is 7 hours, and audio is 24 hours.
Now he's comparing an email attachment downloading the same email attachment in 3G vs. EDGE. 5 seconds vs. 18 seconds.
2.8X faster. Next to Wi-Fi, which loaded the page in 17 seconds, it's "amazingly zippy". Comparing two other 3G phones, one the Nokia N95 and one a Treo 750, which downloads in 33 seconds and 34 seconds respectively. 36% faster.
OH NO HE DIDN'T
59 seconds.
...
How does the iPhone 3G address the problems Steve's listed earlier? Why would you want 3G? Because EDGE is slow a balls. Comparing the two phones downloaidng a website on EDGE and on 3G, 3G finishes in 21 seconds and EDGE finishes in ...
"We've learned so much with the first iPhone." He's pulling out the next iPhone. It's thinner at the edges, has a full plastic back, solid metal buttons, 3.5-inch display, camera, FLUSH HEADPHONE JACK, and improved audio.
SO! What are they going to do? "We're gonna take it to the next level, and today we're introducing the iPhone 3G."
In their first year, they've sold 6 million iPhones "until they ran out a few weeks ago." He's now talking about their "next challenges."
The iPhone has 90% customer satisfaction. 98% of people are browsing. 94% are using email, 90% are text messaging, and 80% are using 10 features or more.
Steve Jobs is back on stage, and he's reminiscing about the iPhone's launch. In a few weeks it'll be the iPhone's first birthday. "This is the phone that has changed phones forever."
Mobileme is available for $99 a year (like .Mac), and will have a 60 day free trial. 20GB of iDisk space is also included. Mobileme replaces .Mac, like we previously thought. .Mac users can keep using their stuff, but can automatically upgrade to mobileme whenever they want.
Photos work exactly the same way too, as Phil is showing off how syncing with that works. I think we get it Phil. "So that's mobileme." "It's like Exchange for the rest of us."
Calendar items work the same, being pushed from everywhere onto all your devices. He's now showing what happens when you move an event on your computer and how it shows up on your iPhone within about 10 seconds.
Now Phil's going through a process of getting an email with a lunch invite, which then loads up Google Maps of the restaurant. He saved the contact of the restaurant on the phone. Now, he goes back to the computer and sees the same email, which got pushed to all his devices with the correct "read" state. He also sees the contact that he created on the phone--the same one he just created--on the computer.
mobileme is looking sweet, but we still haven't heard anything about a new iPhone. Is anybody panicking?
iDisk is now all online, and you can use it to share files to people without emailing stuff around.
In Address Book, there's real-time search with narrowing down of entries as you're typing, as well as Google Maps. The Calendar looks a lot like iCal with its color coding and meeting blocks. Drag and drop works. Gallery (photos) has skimming like in iPhoto and .Mac, thumbnail rescaling, drag and drop, rotate, and sharing.
Phil is demoing the mobileme web app. Everything looks very smooth in the Mail application, with drag and drop, and quick reply popup window.
Photos also work over the air, just like mail, address book and calendar. You can upload photos into your mobileme albums (just like .Mac was before). iDisk is also on there (one of the two icons I couldn't see before), syncing your files and folders.
Pics:
Apple's also built a Web 2.0 suite for mobileme (me.com!) and will let you use Email--looks a lot like Mail.app--as well as calendar, address book, photos, and two other apps I can't see right now.
It works directly with email, calendar, and whatever native applications you've got on Mac and PC. On Mac, it works with iCal, Address Book and Mail. On the PC, it works with Microsoft Outlook.
If an email gets sent to you on your mobileme account, it'll be pushed to all 3 types of devices. If you change a contact on your phone, it'll be reflected to. Same with changing a calendar event. This stuff all works over the air (cellular connection).
"Not all of us work in large enterprises," but will sync your information from up in the cloud down to your device. It works for Macs, PCs and iPhones. It'll push information up and down keeping stuff up to date all the time. Contacts, calendars AND emails.
Phil Schiller is on stage, saying mobile me is like "Exchange for the rest of us". He just called ActiveSync ActiveStink.
Like exchange for the rest of us.
An now, "mobileme". Looks like the new .Mac! Maybe? Let's see.
The Enterprise asked for a way to distribute phones that isn't accessible to other people in the world. They can distribute applications on their own intranet by first authorizing phones on their own network and then distributing it via iTunes.
The App Store will be available in 62 countries. If your app is 10MB or less, you can download it over the cellphone connection, otherwise, Wi-Fi or the iTunes program on your computer.
The App Store icon will automatically tell you when there's an update for apps you've downloaded. Developers keep 70% of the revenues, and will be no charge for free apps. FairPlay DRM will wrap applications.
iPhone 2.0 software will be released in early July. FREE for all iPhone owners. $9.95 for iPod Touch owners.
Parental controls (filtering YouTube, Safari, iTunes or Installing Apps). Also filtering "EXPLICIT CONTENT" in the iPod app. Many languages are now added, including Asian languages. Japanese and Chinese has various input types, including the character recognition (drawing on the screen) that we saw in some screenshots a few weeks back.
Also coming, bulk delete/move, saving images from an email to your photo library, and a scientific calculator that's activated by turning the phone into landscape mode.
Steve's coming back on stage, talking about new features. The first is Contact Search. Second is full iWork document support. You can LOOK at your iWork documents, but not write. Word, Excel and now Powerpoint are also supported (first two were already in there).
There's only one persistent connection needed. "It scales." It's a unified notification service for all developers. From each notification, you can automatically launch the related app by hitting a button. It works over the air or in Wi-Fi, and will be available in September. Developers will be able to play with it soon.
Available in September!
Apple's come up with a "better" solution, which is a Push notification service for all developers. Example: when you're running an IM app, you're actively connected to the server. When you're not running it, the notification service will maintain an IP connection with the server, which will push updates to various apps. Developers can push badges, which tells you how many alerts are waiting, custom alert sounds, and custom textual alerts (like the SMS alert currently).
Task managers: Madness. Instead:
He's showing off Windows Mobile and its Task Manager. The iPhone lovers are laughing at this. HA. HA. HA. And clapping. They're really loving it now.
"The wrong solution that some phones jump to is background processes." The reasons he's listing is battery life and performance, which both degrade faster when you have something else running in the background.
That's it for the developers. One feature that lots of developers are asking for is notifications for apps that aren't currently running.
Digital Legends Entertainment is a developer from Spain that's made a game that they'll demo now. Xavier Carrillo Costa and his sexy Spanish accent--very similar to our own Jesus's--is introducing a 3D game that was ported in 4 days, which looks like Dungeon Siege. No buttons on the screen, but it looks very nice. Dynamic shadow and various other applications are in. The game is still in production and will be available by September. Reminds me a little of God of War as well.
B. Lam: 10:59 am ON Jun 9 2008 Jason Chen: Example use: doctors sharing a patient's image data to the patient "iPhone to iPhone", basically letting them take away their photos to show their family. "Look how bad my hernia is!" 10:57 am ON Jun 9 2008 Jason Chen: Doctors can flip stuff around and view images from various angles. Pinch, double tap and various other current photo-viewing actions can be used in their app. There's even on-screen measurement lines you can draw to see, say, how big a tumor is. It disappears when you shake the phone (accelerometer use). 10:56 am ON Jun 9 2008 B. Lam: 10:56 am ON Jun 9 2008 Jason Chen: The second medical app is from MIMvista, a company that's a "leading developer of medical imaging data." Mark Cain is coming up on stage, showing a CT scan and a PET scan (I've no idea what either one does, but I'm no Dr. House).
Modality is for medical students to view body parts and see where everything is. Much more fun than reading this crap in a book.
Next up is Modality. He's talking about the medical software company Epocrates, who was on stage last time when Apple introduced the SDK (Hi Dixie!). He's introducing two new medical apps, one of which is Modality.
