Apple's WWDC 2008: June 9th, EST10am

Well, here we be again. Mere days to go before another roller-coaster ride of excitement and disappointment.

It's seems like it's going to be all about the iPhone on Monday.

First, there's the almost pre-determined unveiling of the 3G iPhone. Additional features may include GPS, a better camera, a second front-facing camera for video conferencing, a capacity bump to 32GB, longer batter life, a non-recessed headphone jack, and a redesign to the form factor.

Next, there's the 2.0 iPhone software [also for iPod Touch] with pretty much unknown improvements to the OS.

Finally there's the AppStore, the new environment for selling 3rd party applications for the iPhone.

There are minor rumors of a split of the iPhone line into a standard and a "Pro" version, but these have been ranked pretty low on the plausibility scale.

There have also been nagging rumors of another device, either a larger form-factor iPod Touch or very small Mac- essentially a "tablet" driven by either the Touch or full OSX. These are also considered pretty shaky.

As usual, you can catch a live coverage from most tech news sites. Though I've found either macrumors or engadget tend to provide the best coverage.

But it may also be subsidized this time.

As for the approval thing, according to a couple of articles I read a month ago, you can ask the FCC for confidentiality on submissions. Plus, this isn't a new product, it's just has a 3G chipset, so the approval process isn't as daunting.

I think it would be a minor miracle if Jobs is able to announce the 3G iPhone on Monday and say that it's "available now". The most compelling evidence that it won't be available until later in the month is vacation blackout dates for AT&T employees.

Last year AT&T employees were asked to not request vacations from June 15th to July 15th. The iPhone was released on June 29th, 2007.

A similar memo was sent out in May of this year, indicating a no-vacation blackout from June 15th to July 12th.

Unless this is a spectacular misinformation campaign by Apple, don't expect to see the new iPhone for sale on Monday.

On the other hand, if the 3G iPhone isn't made available for sale until June 27th, it will have been 7 weeks that the iPhone has been completely unavailable. Either a very bad idea for those who wanted to buy and ended up buying something else, or very good from a fervor standpoint- there'll be almost as long a lines this year as last year!

Apple Store is pretty much down globally.

nope. Just the text and photo updates until Apple posts it in a couple of hours

This is a developers conference guys. People always think these are about new product announcements when they're not....

Rogers in Canada requires a 3 year contract to get the $199/$299 price, and you can't buy the phone without the contract- so it's sort of a no-option scenario.

People are complaining like the dickens, but an exclusive contract is only smothering if you have another alternative, which we in Canada don't. If you want the iPhone, it's Rogers/Fido- locked or unlocked. And with any serious national competition at least a year and a half down the road, a 3 year "exclusive" contract becomes more like a 1.5 year exclusive contract- and that's IF there's an alternative national GSM carrier by then.

Yeah, but the raw cost of a razor was never $499. An iPhone is never going to be a bargain appliance. I think the "handset for free" mentality is what Apple was rallying against with the G1 iPhone. The providers were fine with that system, because it took the emphasis off the handset makers and put the carriers into the key bargaining positions, which lead to the largely crippled phones that predominated before. With the iPhone, Apple said, "If you make the phone [or mobile computer platform, as I see it] have real value for the consumer, they will be willing to pay for it. And they did. People groused later, but at launch they paid $599 for an 8GB iPhone with half the features and functionality that it has 1 year later. But those original iPhones will still be able to benefit from 90% of the value of the 2.0 software update. They'll be able to do everything new iPhones will, with two exceptions: the GPS and the 3G speed [when not on WiFi]. Considering the statistic that most people change phones every 6 months, that's pretty great. So, I think the lifespan for an iPhone for most people is going to be more akin to that of a laptop than a cellphone. People will only upgrade when hardware advancements make it attractive, with better cameras, videoconferencing, capacity bumps, etc..

What's interesting now is how well Apple will be able to integrate their new MoblieMe service. With devices like the MacBook Air and the iPhone/iPod Touch, perhaps the new paradigm isn't going to be that you have to keep multiple copies of all your data on every device, but simply that you have access to your data from every device.