The WWDC

I was not there yesterday, at the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference, but I did see the keynote on the net. Not much of it was a surprise. The company introduced their long anticipated 3G (Third Generation) phone. It has GPS and a search capability and the developer's kit looks simple enough so that when it actually is released there will be lots of native applications for it. Some of those were demoed and they look interesting. The new phone is half the price ($199 for an 8 GIG model and $299 for 16 GIG). I am sure there will be some criticism about not having a larger memory but I have found in the year I have had the 8 GIG model that I only use about half the space. The new phone also has some other tweaks including a search capability.

What was most interesting to me was the rebranding of the .Mac service. When I purchased my AIR, I began to use the service more intensely, which is a backup disk and some other services bundled to hold some of my materials. It became part of my "cloud." The new service is going to be called MobileME (or simply Me.com). It is an interesting implementation of a way to coordinate among all your devices - Phone, Laptop,Desktop. The service is a bit pricey compared to other backup services ($99 per year for 20 Gigs). One of the original criticisms of the phone was no exchange server technology which many businesses use - now that is no longer a problem.

Don't get me wrong, the new phone is great. But MobileMe looks like the most innovative announcement. One of the defects of the integrated applications of the Mac has been the calendar. My administrative assistant and I have had a very frustrating experience of matching my calendar. The existing one is set up to work off the desktop - now all of the features of the Applications (Mail, Calendar, Contacts) can be worked off a Web Application - which means that anyone with account access - anywhere - can keep my calendar up to date. All this comes out on July 11.