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I joined a few thousand developers in San Francisco for the highly-anticipated keynote from Steve Jobs at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference. From the new iPhone to new software, it was well worth the trip.

The iPhone 3G hits stores on July 11: an ultra-cheap $199 for 8 GB and $299 for 16 GB. The new model is slightly thicker with smaller, more ergonomic buttons and a flush headphone jack hole. Scrapping the silver metal, the basic model has a black plastic casing (the 16 GB is also available in the traditional Mac white).

The two big internal changes are built-in GPS and 3G. Jobs demonstrated its "live tracking," which follows your location with a live blue visual beep. He said Apple was encouraging developers to take advantage of contextual searching based on location. For the 3G, an Apple video showed difference between AT&T's spotty EDGE network and the new 3G network, and on average it was three times as fast - and only slightly slower than iPhone Wi-Fi. Ditto for an e-mail download, which, in the Apple demo, 3G was about four times slower.


3G iPhone to be available in traditional black or new white.

The iPhone 3G will have decent battery life. It has 300 hours of standby time, five hours of 3G talk time, up to six hours of browsing, seven hours of video and 24 hours of music. Jobs also cryptically noted that the iPhone 3G will have "improved sound," which probably means an upgrade to the iPhone's tiny, low-grade speakers.

Regular as well as new iPhones will be getting a 2.0 software upgrade. The bevy of new accoutrements include full iWork and MS Office support - for readable PowerPoint presentation and such - bulk delete and move, and parental controls. It also has an automatic fill-in for searching phone/email contacts and a full scientific calculator whenever you turn the calculator horizontal.

One of the coolest iPhone software 2.0 features is expanded language support - about a dozen international dialects, including two Japanese alphabets and simple and traditional Chinese. The characters of one of the Chinese languages can actually be drawn with your finger.

The global effort neatly ties into Apple's plan to release the iPhone in 70 countries in upcoming months including Canada and Mexico, 15 South American countries, 29 European countries, Australia/New Zealand and, most notably, India and Japan. While the billion-plus citizens need more phones, India has established very aggressive, homegrown cell phone carriers.

    
    See list of coutries here.

Meanwhile, Japan's cell phone technology has consistently been well ahead of America and DoCoMo has had a virtual lockdown on the cell phone business there for several years. Jobs briefly noted a group of partnerships Apple has forged worldwide - partnerships it most certainly will need to flourish in the near future.

The third-party folks also came in force, which included game company Sega, news organization the Associated Press and the Major League Baseball Association Web site.

Sega showed its Super Monkey Ball, the long-awaited translation of its popular marble arcade game, and the screen updated quickly to the tilt controls.


Sega's Super Monkey Ball Running on iPhone (from engadget).

The Associated Press discussed the contextual news service where, depending on your location, the AP would automatically aggregate news from the seven best local news sources.

And MLB.com presented a live games application, with details as minute as who is in left field, and a nice setup of YouTube-quality play-by-play videos minutes after they occur in the game.

The upcoming Super Monkey Ball will run for $9.99 (a reasonable price that will, hopefully, become a standard), while the AP application will be free to download. The Major League Baseball Association didn't discuss price, but it will probably run a few bucks a month.

Finally, the long-rumored MobileMe service takes the best of Microsoft Exchange (e-mail, contact and calendar syncing) and puts it on all Apple platforms - including the iPhone. The $99/year service uses "cloud processing": update a contact on your iPhone and the contact info will be sent to a server which will automatically be update the same contact on your Mac and/or your PC, or, of course, vice versa.

The live demonstration was impressive: a calendar update on the iPhone popped up on the PC in about three seconds, while a photo update took about five. Jobs called it a replacement to .mac, but people who wanted to keep their .mac accounts would still be supported and could upgrade to MobileMe whenever they saw fit.

Nearly everything will be out in early July, around the July 11 launch of the iPhone 3G.

About the Author
Damon Brown wrote the "Pocket Idiot's Guide to the iPhone" (Alpha/Penguin Books). Available on August 7, you can preorder it at Amazon or your favorite online bookstore. Damon also writes for Playboy, SPIN and The New York Post.