Live from Apple's iPhone OS 4 event!
We're on the ground outside of Apple's iPhone OS 4 event, awaiting the doorbuster stampede we hope to be a part of soon. Keep it tuned here, and check back at the times below for the official start!
07:00AM - Hawaii
10:00AM - Pacific
11:00AM - Mountain
12:00PM - Central
01:00PM - Eastern
06:00PM - London
07:00PM - Paris
09:00PM - Moscow
11:41AM Okay, that's it for us. Time to get lunch! Thanks so much for reading along, and a big thanks to Justin Glow, Dan Chilton, and the Blogsmith team for keeping us chugging along!
11:40AM Steve: "Okay, thanks for coming. Thanks!"
11:40AM Q: How do you close applications when multitasking? A: (Scott) You don't have to. The user just uses things and doesn't ever have to worry about it. (Steve) It's like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager... they blew it. Users shouldn't ever have to think about it.
11:38AM Q: Are you concerned about leaving out your older customer base (with the lack of features for older devices). A: (Steve) Well, a lot of these products that are out there are the most recent products. The old devices will get the update, but they'll miss some of these features like multitasking. If that's an incentive for them to upgrade to a new device... terrific.
11:35AM Scott: Game Center is going to help spread the viral information about those apps.
11:35AM Q: How will the App Store change with 4? Discoverability and organization is a problem. How will you improve that? A: (Steve) The App Store is not part of iPhone OS 4, it's a service, and it is programmed mostly on the server side. We can enhance it without waiting for a major release. We can constantly improve it. We have to be careful that we don't bring the service down -- as you've noticed it has a very high uptime. In terms of discoverability, we've added Genius, but I also see an infrastructure starting to evolve to help people find apps. What I see happening is that there's a lot building up outside and around the iPhone, that are starting to provide some of that recommendation.
11:32AM Steve was asked about the iPad. Steve: "When people look back... this will be a huge thing in the history of personal computational devices."
11:29AM Wow. Just wow.
11:29AM Ryan Block from GDGT: What about running unsigned apps? Steve: You know, there's a porn store for Android. Anyone can download them. You can, your kids can. That's just not a place we want to go.
11:27AM How is Apple going to stop us from driving our cars into houses, trees, or people? With a strict, secretive approval process... that's how.
11:26AM Uh, wow. "What are you doing about distracted driving?" Really man? Really?
11:23AM Also, when Steve was asked if there were plans to add Flash or java, his response was a flat: No.
11:22AM We just asked Steve and co. about the lack of anything that can keep track of a timeline for something like a Twitter or IM app. Scott says that the new save states for applications will be much better than the current situation. Steve also said that they stand behind push notifications and still think it's the right choice for this platform. Then we asked about widgets or glanceable information and why it hasn't been implemented on this platform or the iPad. "Apple sort of pioneered the idea of glanceable information like widgets and it seems to me you've gone to great lengths to avoid something like that in this new OS. Can you tell me a little bit about why you've decided that? With something like the iPad, it seems perfect opportunity where you have a lot of real estate." Steve: "We shipped on Saturday, and rested on Sunday." (lots of laughs) We pressed and asked if it was possible. Steve: "Anything is possible."
11:14AM Lots of talk about iAd... which isn't quite Engadget's bread and butter.
11:12AM Q: Will there be an ad approval process? A: (Jobs... super long pause) Um... well there's going to be some process... but these people are paying to run ads. So, I'm not sure it'll be anything other than a light touch.
11:08AM Q: But what about Pandora? A: (Jobs) I don't think you're right. It doesn't use that much data.
11:07AM Q: Given that multitasking will increase data usage, how do you think AT&T will handle that? A: (Jobs) I'm not sure that's a correct assumption.
11:06AM Okay, the Q&A is starting with Jobs, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall.
11:03AM So we're hanging out for the Q&A -- any questions guys?
11:03AM Wow. That's a long wait. "We're going to have a short break, and then a Q&A. Thanks for coming."
11:02AM "And, we're bringing OS 4 to the iPad this Fall."
11:02AM "We are releasing it for end users for iPhone and iPod touch for users this summer. For the 3GS and iPod touch 3rd gen. And, for iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2nd gen, they will run many things... but there are some things they won't run, like multitasking."
11:01AM "So let's review. Multitasking, folders, enhanced mail, iBooks, enterprise, Game Kit, and iAd. And these are just seven of the 100 new user features. Now we are releasing a dev preview today."
11:01AM "So that is iAd, and that is our seventh tent pole."
11:00AM These ads are looking a lot more like apps. Almost totally separate apps that live inside apps. Is your mind blown yet?
10:59AM Now Steve is showing off a Target app. He's building his dorm room. "I am a... dude, who's into... music.... and I'm going to Michigan."
10:58AM "So here's Nike ID... you can make your own shoes. And there's an app right here that I can download to my phone." Steve seems pretty pumped about these new opportunities. Certainly more jazzed than he was about iBooks.
10:57AM Now Steve is showing an Air Jordan ad with an embedded video. This is kind of cool -- the ad has a "history of the Air Jordan" app/ad.
10:56AM "And, there's a Toy Story Mania game that I can buy right in this ad, inside of this app. Have you ever seen an ad like this?" Pause. "Anything even close?"
10:56AM "I've got posters here... and I can just tap them and add them as wallpaper. Theaters, I can see where the movie is playing." Nice, it's using the Maps API.
10:55AM "They've included a game here too... well, we've included a game." Ha.
10:55AM So Steve is showing a completely interactive ad here, almost like a sub-app inside the application. Embedded video, toys to play with. Really impressive as far as mobile advertising goes. If that kind of thing excites you.
10:54AM "Here's some news... there's an ad for Toy Story 3 down there... it's a great movie Disney is putting out. I've seen it, it's a really good movie!" Ha! Big laughs. "So all this is done in HTML5 by the way." Ouch! More laughs for Steve.
10:53AM "We've taken some brands that we love and made some ads for them... we made some fun ads, these are not endorsements."
10:52AM Demo time!
10:52AM "For devs to add this to their apps is really simple. They can do it in an afternoon. Apple is going to sell and host the ads, and we're going to do a 60/40 split."
10:52AM "Because iAd is in the iPhone OS itself, we have figured out how to do interactive and video content without ever taking you out of the app."
10:51AM "So that's what iAd is all about. It's about motion plus interactivity. The ads keep you in your app. Today when you click on a banner ad, it yanks you out of your app and throws you onto the advertisers web page. So people don't click on the ads."
10:51AM "You know the ads on the web -- they're eye catching and interactive, but they don't deliver emotion. What we want to do with iAds is deliver interaction and emotion."
10:50AM "This is a pretty serious opportunity, and it's an incredible demographic. But we want to do more than that. We want to change the quality of the ads too."
10:49AM "The average user spends over 30 minutes every day using apps on their phone. If we said we wanted to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that's 10 ads per device per day. That would be 1b ad opportunities per day."
10:49AM "When you look at ads on a phone, it's not like a desktop. On a desktop, search is where it's at. But on mobile devices, that hasn't happened. Search is not happening on phones; people are using apps. And this is where the opportunity is to deliver advertising is."
10:48AM "We have a lot of free or reasonably priced apps... we like that, but our devs have to find ways to make money. So our devs are putting ads into apps, and for lack of a better way to say it, we think most of this kind of advertising sucks." Ouch!
10:47AM "So our seventh tent pole is called... iAd. It's mobile advertising. Now, what's this about?"
10:47AM "That's available for everyone later this year." And Steve is back!
10:46AM Wow. So Apple's got their Xbox Live. This is kind of huge. Achievements, leaderboards, match making.
10:46AM "We want to make gaming even better on the iPhone -- so we added a social gaming network."
10:46AM "Our 6th tent pole is Game Center. This is a dev preview for OS 4. Gaming is extremely popular on the iPhone and iPod touch. We have 50,000 games. Let's compare that to the competition... the PSP and DS... we blow them out of the water."
10:45AM Support for multiple Exchange accounts, Exchange Server 2010, and new VPN options.
10:44AM Better data protection, mobile device management, wireless app distribution...
10:43AM Scott is back for number 5. "Here's some great features for enterprise. We have some really nice features here. Starting with even better data protection."
10:43AM "We labored about that on the iPad, what to include... and Winnie the Pooh won."
10:42AM "We're going to wirelessly sync your books between platforms... and free Winnie The Pooh."
10:42AM "We think customers will really enjoy this. It's a delightful ebook reader. You can buy your books once and read them anywhere." Even Steve doesn't seem that excited about this.
10:41AM It's iBooks on your iPhone. Not heart stopping.
10:41AM "So that's number 3. Number 4... we're adding iBooks for iPhone OS 4."
10:40AM "And, open attachments. The ability to get an attachment and open it with an app for the app store."
10:40AM "Now if you want to focus on one account, we've added fast inbox switching. In addition we've added the option to organize by thread." Finally!
10:39AM "All of your mail is in one inbox. And, we've made it so you can have more than one Exchange account."
10:39AM "The first thing: unified inbox."
10:39AM "So that's tent pole number 2. Now let's go to number 3. It's an enhanced mail." Oh yes!
10:38AM "You used to be able to see 180 apps on your phone, now it's over 2000."
10:38AM "So that is folders." Okay, we like folders a lot.
10:37AM So, it's just like changing wallpaper. On anything. Ever.
10:37AM "Now one of the other things I wanted to show you was the homescreen, the ability to change the wallpaper." Okay, a demo of wallpaper? Really Steve?
10:36AM "I can drag this around anywhere I want. I can have as many as I'd like. I can also put a folder in the dock."
10:36AM The icon becomes a multi-icon icon. Kind of cool!
10:36AM "I want to make a folder with games in it. I have several games, so I just push my finger on an app, they start to jiggle, and I just drag one app on top of another and it instantly makes a folder. It also automatically names the folder based on the categories of these apps, or I can rename."
10:35AM "People are having to flick from page to page to page to find them. Folder fit the bill. Let me just show you what it's like."
10:35AM "So our second tentpole... folder."
10:34AM "So there are our seven services for multitasking. To go along with all this, we have this incredible user interface. And that is multitasking, which is our first tentpole for iPhone OS 4, and now back to Steve."
10:34AM "Next, task completion. There are some apps that take awhile to complete a task. Like uploading pictures to flickr -- now it can continue to upload pictures in the background. And our last one -- fast app switching. It's what allows applications to save its state and stop running, and then restart instantly where you left it."
10:33AM "Now building on push notifications is local notifications. It doesn't need to use our servers."
10:32AM "That is background location. Next, push notifications. They're very popular, in 9 months we've pushed more than 10b notifications." Now Scott is explaining the push process using Apple's servers. A process that has seemed fairly limited to us.
10:31AM "We take privacy very seriously. We're taking it further in iPhone OS 4. We're adding an indicator on the status bar to see if something is asking for your location. Next we're asking fine grain settings you can enable or disable per application. And if any of them have asked for your location in 24 hours, we'll show you."
10:30AM "Our baseband is always connected to cell towers, so it knows when you move." Hmm, this isn't going to be that precise for apps like FourSquare.
10:29AM "Now GPS uses a fair bit of power, but that's okay for something like this. But there's another class of application that wants to use your location... social networking applications like Loopt. For that, we use cell towers."
10:29AM "So VOIP. The next service is background location. There are two classes of apps that want to use this -- turn by turn, like TomTom. These always want to know where you are so they can provide directions. Now you can get them in the background, you can even listen to music, and it's still giving you directions."
10:28AM And Scott is back.
10:27AM "Hey Aaron are you there?" "Yeah you want to go to dinner tonight?" "Yeah, let me go into other apps to find a restaurant." And... it's multitasking.
10:26AM "Until today navigating away from the app meant that I would go offline. Now I go into the background, but I can still receive calls." Call coming through... in a pop up!
10:26AM David Ponsford from Skype is up. "Thanks everybody. We have half a billion users, and iPhone OS 4 makes it even more convenient to use Skype."
10:25AM "Now when you're on Skype, you can switch to another app, and you get a double-high status bar. And when you're not running it in the foreground, you can still receive calls."
10:24AM So that was the background audio API... next up is VOIP.
10:24AM You can jump into the iTunes store out of the app while music plays... so you can buy music. "Thanks very much." Still, no deep dive on how that works. Obviously the whole app doesn't stay running.
10:23AM "I can control Pandora from the lock screen. I've heard this song somewhere before..."
10:23AM They're showing off multitasking with Pandora in the background. It's... playing in the background. Pretty seamless experience, which is good.
10:22AM "It took us one day to make Pandora fully background aware on the iPhone."
10:22AM "Our growth rate doubled over night. We add 30,000 new listeners a day on the iPhone."
10:22AM "Thanks Scott. It's no exaggeration to say that the iPhone has changed the future of Pandora. I could take this little guy out of my pocket and choose music to suit my needs."
10:21AM "Until now, if you left the app to go to another one, the music stopped. No longer. Pandora can continue to play music in the background while you switch to apps. And you can use a controller in the lock screen to control Pandora." Pandora's Tim Westergren is up.
10:20AM "Let me show you an example... Pandora."
10:20AM "So how did we do this? We're providing seven multitaking services as APIs to developers."
10:19AM "So to explain how we did this while preserving battery and performance... Scott Forstall."
10:18AM "And again, I can go home anytime I want. Boom I'm home. Make sense? Really simple UI, puts all the apps at the bottom that are running." You can scroll through the list. "Also, you see the new look of the dock. So that is multitasking. We've been using it a lot and it changes the way you use the iPhone."
10:18AM "So now I want to go back to my game. Pretty cool, huh?"
10:17AM "Now I want to go to ebay -- I go right to where I left off in the apps, now I want to play a game -- now I want to play a game, Tap Tap Revenge, it keeps me where I was. Again, the game stops, let me go back and look at mail."
10:17AM "I'm gonna launch mail, this has a URL -- so I jump to safari -- so I want to go back to mail... I double click the home button and a window raises that shows me all the apps that are running." Like a dock you can call up -- smart!
10:16AM Demo time
10:15AM "We figured out how to implement multitasking for third party apps and avoid those things. So that's what took so long. I'd like to demo it. We have a great UI."
10:15AM "It's easy to do this in a way that drains battery life, and a way that reduces performance of the foreground app. If you don't do it right, your phone will feel sluggish."
10:15AM "Now we weren't the first to this party, but we're gonna be the best. Just like cut and paste."
10:14AM Multitasking!
10:14AM "We're going to talk about 7 new features... the first one which is the biggest one... multitasking."
10:14AM Bluetooth keyboards... we thought the day would never come. No mention of multitasking... YET.
10:13AM Keyboards!
10:13AM "In addition, there's over 100 new user features. Create playlists, 5x digital zoom, tap to focus on video, gift apps, geotagging, places in the photo app, change the homescreen wallpaper, bluetooth keyboards... spell checker."
10:13AM "We're releasing a framework called accelerate -- for hardware accelerated math functions."
10:12AM Over 1500 new APIs in OS 4. Devs can access the calendar, photo library, quicklook...
10:12AM "So today we are giving a dev preview of iPhone OS 4. We've been working on this for a while, it's pretty great -- we're going to ship this summer and release a dev preview today."
10:11AM "We've sold over 50m iPhones to date, and if you add the touch, over 85m iPhones and iPod touches. If you're a dev, that's a plum market to go after."
10:11AM "iPhone has a 64% mobile browser use share... everything else added together is half the iPhone."
10:10AM "Now let's get to the iPhone. We won the JD Power award for 2010, but we've won it for the last 3 years in a row. Now if we take a look at market share, one way to look at it is what's the share of use -- what is US mobile browser use?"
10:10AM "And of all the futuristic magazines out there, Pop Sci is really great. And Netflix... the quality of the video is very nice... and... where would we be without an accordion?" Ha! Big laughs for that.
10:09AM He's talking about the ABC app now.
10:08AM "Marvel's got a great comic book app... weather, the universe, MLB... fantastic apps. Epicurious for recipes. Etrade... this is a fantastic app from IMBD." Okay, Steve loves apps.
10:08AM Steve is showing off apps... "We've got some awesome driving games."
10:07AM "And we have over 3500 iPad apps in the store. These apps on the iPad are just amazing. I want to show you some screenshots of some of the apps. You'll be surprised how great these are if you haven't seen them."
10:07AM "So that's a little update on the iPad. Now I'd like to talk about the App store. Users have downloaded well over 4b apps. Yeah. To date. And we have over 185,000 apps in the App Store."
10:06AM "Beyond all the numbers, this is what it was about for us." Ha! A pic of a little girl opening an iPad box. Cute Steve.
10:06AM "As of today, users have downloaded 3.5m."
10:05AM "iBooks, over 600,000 downloads. We've gotten tremendous feedback on iBooks. The first day iPad apps... users downloaded over 1m apps."
10:05AM "I'm told Best Buy is out of stock... we're making them as fast as we can. We can't make enough of them... so we'll have to try harder."
10:05AM "The first day we sold 300,000 iPads, and I want to update you -- as of today we've sold about 450,000." Cheers for that from the group here.
10:04AM Steve is reading a few choice quotes from some of the early reviews.
10:04AM "Walt's a pretty tough critic and I thought this was pretty amazing."
10:04AM "Thanks for coming this morning. We have something we're pretty excited about -- and that is iPhone 4. Before we get to that I have some updates. The first is the iPad -- we just started shipping. Before we shipped it we got some great reviews..." Oh he's quoting Walt Mossberg, surprise!
10:03AM Jobs is out!
10:02AM So far, no sign of the "can you hear me now" guy -- in case you were wondering about any Verizon presence here.
10:01AM Hey readers -- we had a slight Digg badge problem, if you Dugg the post earlier, you might need to reclick the badge below and re-Digg. Or click here. Go ahead -- it's fun AND safe!
10:00AM "Ladies and gentlemen, please switch your devices to silent mode." Okay, this is a good sign.
9:59AM Now something a little funkier. This music is revealing nothing about what might be in store... unless Apple is trying to tell us that the new iPhone OS will be similar to someone's schizophrenic iTunes playlist. That could be cool.
9:54AM Okay -- we're in and in our seats. And... Phoenix is on the sound system. Go figure!
9:51AM Still not in! Looks like this could start a little late...
9:39AM We're just outside the doors now and the venue has gotten way more packed -- hopefully we won't be overrun by a pack of roving developers.
9:22AM Okay, we're inside and waiting for the doors to the theater to open up. It's not insanely packed (which is good for our elbows), but it's certainly buzzing. We'll be in our seats soon, so hang tight.
