Vincent is heading to get his badge. We will start taking photos shortly.

Line to get Badges. Press starting to line up.

Entrance to the press event.

The long line is forming quickly.

Vince has received his badge and waiting to get into the press hall.

We want to Thank Eye-Fi (& Gina) for helping us with our Eye-Fi card problem.

Not good, just saw an AT&T vb bossman… could be partnered w/att for apple tablet?

Very very crowded now. Waiting to enter the hall.

Waiting to get in (Video)

We are inside the press hall! Less than 15 minutes until it starts

Interesting setup on-stage today, with a chair and a table. Don’t remember seeing that before at previous Apple events we’ve covered.

There’s still a lot of people trying to find places to sit. Event is due to start in just under ten minutes.

Music today is Bob Dylan, there have been several tracks by him so far.

Apple are asking people with MacBooks to hold them up for photos – so they can see the logos better

They’re asking us to silence cellphones – the program will begin shortly

Four minutes until the event is due to begin

WiFi in this venue is, as expected, pretty bad. We’ve brought along a MiFi for our connectivity today.

Al Gore is here; pics in a minute

Two minutes to go…

Music so far has been all Dylan, one of his live concert recordings

Al Gore in the house

Lights are going down…

Steve Jobs is coming on-stage

Standing ovation from parts of the room, huge amounts of applause

Starting talking about iPhone – “a few weeks we’d sold 250m iPhones”

Sorry, that should have been iPods, not iPhones

284m retail stores

Next update: the App Store “an incredible phenomenon” – over 140k applications

“Just ended our holiday quarter: $50.6bn of revenue”

“Where does Apple get its revenue – iPods, iPhones and of course Macs”

iPods, iPhones and most Macs are all mobile devices – Apple is the largest mobile device company in the world, now. Larger than Sony’s mobile device company, bigger than Samsung’s, in terms of revenue it’s bigger than Nokia

Now let’s get to the main event… starting by going backward to 1981

Now let’s get to the main event… starting by going backward to 1981

We started with the laptop, then the iPhone, and now we’re asking if there’s something in the middle

Something better than a laptop for watching video, browsing photos, enjoying your music, reading ebooks, playing games. If there’s going to be a third category it has to do better at these tasks than your laptop or smartphone.

Some people have said this is netbooks, but they’re not better at anything – they’re just cheap laptops. But we think we’ve got something that is better, and we’d like to show you it today. We call it the iPad

It’s the best browsing experience you’ve ever had, way better than a laptop and way better than a smartphone
You can turn iPad any way you want, it automatically adjusts. To see a full webpage is phenomenal – to hold a full webpage in your hand is a phenomenal experience

It’s the best browsing experience you’ve ever had, way better than a laptop and way better than a smartphone
You can turn iPad any way you want, it automatically adjusts. To see a full webpage is phenomenal – to hold a full webpage in your hand is a phenomenal experience

iTunes store is build in, YouTube with high-def, and it’s awesome to watch TV shows and movies on

OS is from the iPhone, rather than OS X, all very smooth. Web browsing demo switches from portrait to landscape

Email demo now, list of messages on the left and full text on the right; the on-screen keyboard is almost fill-sized

Moving onto photos, and the gestures look pretty much as you’d expect from the iPhone, flicking and swiping to change between slides.

The iPad will work with both Windows and Macs, but if you have iPhoto on a Mac it will pull in photo data such as GPS position and location using Places.

The UI looks like a cross between what you’d have on the iPhone and what you’d see on OS X

There are photo transitions and effects, too; Steve is sat in the chair we mentioned earlier, resting the iPad on his crossed leg and tapping it with one hand

Moving onto looking at iTunes, and the interface is much fuller than you’d get on an iPhone. Choosing to play more Bob Dylan

You can buy sample and buy songs directly on the iPad. Pop-up information that shows song and album details

Moving onto the Calendar app, whole thing looks like a traditional diary planner

Pages are animated, with transitions – it’s quite like the Microsoft Courier demo video we saw leaked last year, in fact

Now moving onto Google Maps with Street View

It’s pulling down location – via GPS we’re assuming. He’s looking at a full-screen Street View shot of a restaurant

Moving onto media playback, with a Star Trek demo video

Not good, just saw an AT&T vb bossman… could be partnered w/att for apple tablet?

You can access chapters and flip the iPad into landscape mode to watch wide-screen, though there are black bars top and bottom since the display isn’t 16:9

Now covering specifications: 9.7-inch display and it’s just 0.5-inches thick. It has between 16GB and 64GB of flash memory onboard.only 10 hrs of battery life. Apple developed their own chip, the 1GHz Apple A4 chip, and is has WiFi 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1

There’s also an accelerometer, digital compass, speaker and a microphone, together with a 30-pin dock connector. The battery lasts for 10hrs runtime or over a month of standby time.

Jobs is stressing the environmental credentials now, too. The iPad is arsenic free, BFR free, mercury free and PVC free. He’s mentioned WiFi but no 3G – so far no word on cellular connectivity.

Scott Forstall is onstage now to talk about apps for the iPad

Applications downloaded from the App Store – regular iPhone apps – will run unmodified on the iPad

He’s showing the Facebook app – the standard one you can run on your iPhone today – and it’s in the center of the screen, but with a tap of the button it doubles in size to fill the display.

Note on unmodified apps – If unmodified, apps can run in a small window in the middle of the display, basically 1:1 pixel, or you can double the pixels and have full-screen but lower resolution

Scott’s demonstrating Snocross from ESPN; he’s steering by tilting the iPad, using the accelerometer. Apple have added iPad support to the iPhone SDK.

The updated SDK is available to download today, and it includes an iPad simulator to test apps.

“We think it’s going to be a gold rush for developers” – the App Store is loaded on the iPad

And Apple will feature iPad apps at the front of the App Store, prioritized over iPhone apps (though you can still access the latter)

Now inviting developers on-stage to talk about coding for the iPad, starting with Gameloft

It’s the usual thing – what can they come up with in just a few weeks. Gameloft have brought along Nova, the iPad version. One of the benefits is having more screen space for expansive controls.

There’s an on-screen D-Pad which you can slide around, holding the iPad in both hands like an iPhone. But there are new ways to control it too, like three-finger gestures.

Also showing drawing a box around targets to select them, so as to fire at multiple targets at once

Now NYT are on-stage, with Martin Nisenholtz talking about the paper’s app

They’ve built a customized app for the iPad, just as they did for the iPhone, with NYT content. It looks just like the regular paper, or at least a lot more than the iPhone version does

Can flip between landscape and portrait orientations just by flipping the iPad, together with resizing text using pinch-zooming. Tapping zooms into a column, and there’s a live-updates setting which pulls breaking news into all the different sections

You can also play videos that have been embedded into the NYT app

Next on stage is an art app, Brushes

Steve Sprang from Brushes is on-stage to talk about the app

Apparently it doesn’t matter what your skill level is, anyone can paint with their fingertips

Brushes is doing a great job of showing off the new UI for the iPad, pop-up menus

Electronics Arts’ Travis Boatman says their primary interest was “the device’s performance” They’ve brought along the iPad version of Need For Speed

Boatman describes playing on the iPad as “like holding a huge, HDTV screen just inches from your face”

Brushes is doing a great job of showing off the new UI for the iPad, pop-up menus

Graphics on Need For Speed look incredible. Boatman says they had room to add a gear-shifter which you tap to change, and you can also tap the mirror to get a rear-view

Next on stage is MBL.com

Chad Evans is demonstrating the baseball app. “We had to create a new experience to suit this display”

Can browse back through previous game information, step through games and watch the pitcher. It’ll show the trajectory of the ball from the player’s perspective. And because of the extra screen space they can fit that and live video on at the same time. Video with home or away announcers is available.

That’s MLB.com done with

Scott Forstall back on-stage. He’s “incredibly excited” about the potential, but “while we wait for apps” all of the existing iPhone apps will run

Now Steve Jobs is back on stage, and he’s going to talk about ebooks. Showing a Kindle on-screen

Amazon “has done a great job pioneering” ebooks, but Apple are “going to stand on their shoulders” and take it further. Launching an app called iBooks

Menus look like bookshelves, literally – wooden effect, with the titles on the shelves

It’s integrated with an iBook store from which you can purchase and d/l books direct to the iPad. They’ve partnered with Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, MacMillan and Hachett Book Group

(A lot of these names you might remember from December 2009, complaining about ebooks and saying they were going to delay releasing them!)

Different ways to browse, including top 10 lists, the NYT list, bestsellers, etc. You can tap a book to get more information on it and see reviews, as well as download samples as you would on the Kindle. When you buy it, it turns up on your virtual bookshelf: a tap opens it up.

It’s basically iTunes for ebooks

Reading the books, meanwhile, is all animated with page-turns; you can tap or drag to flip through. It’s up to publishers whether they want B&W or color content, and they can embed video too.

Readers can change the font and the size of the font

There’s a contents page and you can easily flip through to the chapter you want

iBooks will offer fiction and textbooks.

Now moving on to iWork

iBooks uses ePUB format btw

Apparently a year ago Steve asked the iWork team to produce a version for iPad – they said they needed “a lot of horsepower”

The iPad can handle that, but it requires a new UI; Phil Schiller coming on-stage to talk about it.

Phil’s recapping iWork – apparently millions of Mac users “truly love” it. They’ve developed a completely new Keynote version for the iPad, along with a new Pages version which is “the most beautiful word processor you’ll see”, and a new Numbers app. Phil says it’s “fun and cool”

Starting a demo of iWork on iPad now

Starting with showing presentations; can create a new one from scratch on the iPad

All the slides are shown in thumbnails along one side, with the current slide next to them

It’s all very impressive, and the UI looks great, but we can’t imagine many people getting the iPad with iWork in mind

Can import images from the Photo app, resize and move around

It’s possible to do basic editing – rotating with multitouch, cropping, etc – within Keynote

There are also various preset animations which you can easily add, together with slide transitions

It all looks smooth and straightforward

Now looking at the iPad version of Pages; it has the same documents gallery, where you pick a file by a thumbnail

As soon as you tap on the document (or text in it) the keyboard shows up; you can run Pages in landscape or portrait mode, and the keyboard resizes appropriately

Horizontal, the iPad keyboard is almost full-sized

Just as you would on the desktop app, you can change text layout and image wrapping – he’s pasted in an image of a giraffe and the text is automatically reflowing

Now in the spreadsheet app, Numbers. You can load up several sheets simultaneously, and there are tabs running along the top of the display to flip between

You can create tables and graphs directly on the iPad, it all looks like, well, a spreadsheet program.

Apple have also developed a custom keyboard intended for data-entry: it’s “exactly what you need”

Basically has a numeric keypad, the usual plus/minus/etc keys and quick access to functions, date/time, ABC, etc.

There are also more complex elements – you can highlight and rearrange pages, drag out charts with your fingers, etc. That’s it for iWork

Phil Schiller is really impressed with the power and capability of the apps for iPad, he’s calling them “tremendous”

iWork apps will be sold separately for iPad users, at $9.99 each

Keyboard

He’s just mentioned that they’re easy to connect to a projector, though we don’t know any more details on that yet

Steve Jobs back on stage

There are still a few more things to cover

“Isn’t it great?” he asks

Now talking about iTunes sync. iPad will work in that way just like an iPod/iPhone. All your apps, media, contacts, calendar, bookmarks will by sync’d

Every iPad has WiFi, but they’re going to have models with integrated 3G too

Now talking about cost

Saying cellphone companies usually charge $60 per month for a data contract

Apple have two data plans, they’re going to offer $14.99 for up to 250MB of data, or $29.99 for unlimited data. Partnering with AT&T (oh no!)

You also get free AT&T WiFi hotspot access. It’s all pre-pay, managed on the iPad itself, and you can cancel the contract at any point

International deals will follow in in June/July

All iPad models are unlocked and use “GSM micro-SIMS”

“If your carrier uses micro-SIMS it’s likely it’ll just work” – we can’t think of any carriers who do, though, off the top of our heads

“So, iPad – it’s phenomenal to hold the internet in your hand”

Steve reckons it’s the best device he’s “ever seen”

Recapping what they’ve announced today

Now talking about price, the pundits say it’ll be $999 but “we had a very aggressive price goal” – want to get it into many hands, and they met their cost goals

iPad starts at $499

That got a great reaction in the room, lots of cheering

“At $449 lots of people can afford an iPad” – we’re still waiting to hear what you get for that

That’s the WiFi-only 16GB model for $499. $599 gets you the 32GB and $699 gets you 64GB. None have 3G, which will cost $130 on top.

All will begin shipping worldwide in 60 days time!

The 3G versions will take another 30 days after that (so 90 days in all)

Talking about accessories – a dock comes with it

There’s a keyboard dock – basically looks like an Apple keyboard with a dock section that the iPad sits in

Then there’s a case which doubles as a stand

Now showing a video about the accessories, with Jonathan Ive

Steve didn’t give pricing for any of the accessories, nor make clear which come with the iPad and which you’ll have to buy separately.

Ive says the iPad is “magical”

The video is showing all sides of the iPad – there’s no sign of a camera as far as we can tell

Ive is talking about how you don’t have to think, you just tap

Reiterating that the onscreen keyboard is “practically” the same as a laptop keyboard

Showing typing with both hands, with the on-screen keyboard taking up just under half the display in landscape orientation

We’re still waiting on hearing about multitasking, and iPhone OS 4.0

More accessories

According to video you can transfer apps from your iPhone to the iPad, rather than have to re-buy them. Going over some hardware stats: more than 1,000 hardware sensors Apple have used for multitouch

LED backlit display that uses IPS for increased viewing angles

Now talking about the Apple A4 chip. iPad is fanless.

More iPad photos

Video is done; Steve Jobs back on-stage

He’s asking whether Apple “have what it takes” to define a new, third product category

Unsurprisingly he thinks they do, the iPad fits in-between iPhone and Mac, and with a solid app offering including iBooks, iWork and iTunes

There are over 125m accounts with credit cards registered that can buy from the new iTunes/iBook/App Store

Reiterating that it’s “magical and revolutionary” and that the price is “unbelievable”

Apparently Apple want to be at the “intersection” where tech and liberal arts meet – intuitive products that are easy and fun to use

There’s a hands-on area just next door, so we’ll be heading over there to grab photos and video – they’ll be up asap!

Looks like that’s everything for today!

We want to thank you for sticking with us and the SlashGear liveblog – and in record numbers! Over twice the amount of people than for previous record, just over 1m of you!

Stay glued to SlashGear for hands-on photos and video as soon as we can get them.

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Phil Schiller coming on stage.
There are set to be 5,200 developers attending WWDC, from 54 countries.

Phil: “Can’t you feel the love in this room?”
Showing us a graphic of OS X user growth from 2002 to 07
“Something incredible has happened over the last two years” Number of active users has tripled to 75m users

Apple and customers are in love with the new MacBook design
They’re announcing a new version of the 15-inch MacBook Pro
Unibody chassis, built-in battery up to 7hrs runtime – up from 5hrs

Plus more environmentally friendly. They can squeeze 1,000 recharge cycles out of the battery, rather than 300 from the old battery tech
It’s “just as thin and just as light” as the old machine and it has the “nicest display we’ve ever put in a notebook”
They’ve dropped the expresscard slot and replaced it with an SD Card slot!

Something people have been asking for for a long time. Apparently only “single digit” customers used expresscard slot. SD is a standard now, it’s the fastest notebook Apple have ever made

With up to a 3.06GHz dual core CPU and up to 8GB of DDR3 memory, up to 500gb of traditional hard-drive or 256GB of SSD
Starts at $1,699, which is lower than the model it replaces by $300, in fact

$1,699 gets you a 2.53GHz model with 4GB RAM, 250GB hard-drive, 9400M graphics and SD
$1,999 steps up to the 2.6GHz model – same ram but 320GB hard-drive and dual 9400M and 9600M GT graphics
$2,299 gets you 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard-drive and the dual graphics

Also, 17-inch MBP gets an update, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard-drive plus the 9400M and 9600M GT graphics together with a price cut of $300 to $2,499
They’ll both ship today, 15 and 17 inch MBP. New 13-inch MacBook too Built-in battery and new display

The 13-inch model is being absorbed into the MacBook Pro range and will cost $1,199
Basic model gets a 2.25GHz processor, just 2GB of DDR3 ram, 9400m graphics, 160GB hard-drive
Step up to $1,499 and you get 2.53GHz, 4GB of DDR3, 9400m graphics and the SD card slot – Both models are available to buy today

MacBook Air is next to get an upgrade. Price cut by $300 to $1,499 for the 1.86Ghz model. The SSD version goes down to $1,799 – a cut of $700. The SSD Air has the 2.13GHz processor as standard, and 128GB of storage

Betrand Sorre taking the stage
“Great hardware deserves great software”
“What a sharp contrast with Vista our OS is”
“Leopard is the most successful software product Apple has ever had”
“By far the best OS written for the majority of customers, even more complexity is present in Windows 7 – the same old tech as Vista, just another version”

They’re adding Exchange support to it and UI of Finder hasn’t changed but it’s now been rewritten in Cocoa
The icons draw faster, trash empties quicker, describing it as refining 90% of the OS; cancellations happen faster, icon previews are better, and animations are improved.
They’ve built Expose into the dock and the overall installation process has speeded up by 45%, plus, you’ll get 6GB back from your hard-drive once you install Snow Leopard, as it compresses system files

They’ve changed the PDF handling to better cope with text selection “We used a little bit of AI” Mail also gets a speed boost in Snow Leopard.
Shipping Safari 4 for Leopard, Tiger and Windows today; it’s 7.8x faster than IE8. Passes all 100 of the Acid 3 tests, the standard for today’s browsers. IE8 gets 21 out of 100, Safari gets new “crash resistance” mainly from a better way of handling plugins

Talking about new Quicktime version, “Quicktime X”, it supports color sync and hardware acceleration, HTTP streaming
Modern foundation, gets a slick new icon
“Super efficient” HTTP streaming works with any server and they’ve given the UI a makeover too

Snow Leopard upgrade is priced at $29, Family Pack upgrade costs $49. It’ll be available in September

Now moving onto the iPhone, Scott Forstall coming on-stage
Apple released the native SDK less than a year ago, so that devs could create “truly native” applications
There are now more than 50,000 apps in the App Store and has sold more than 40m iPhones and iPod touches, and the apps run on all of them

29 carriers will support iPhone MMS at launch. AT&T will be ready for MMS at the end of the summer
Now talking about spotlight search across iPhone – searching calendars, music, notes, email

Now talking about tethering “this allows you to share your connection with your computer”. It works with Mac and Pc, over USB or Bluetooth
“it is a seamless experience” – no tethering software on your computer, once it’s on. Requires carrier support, unsurprisingly tethering has 22 partners in 44 countries and ominously no mention of AT&T (no AT&T tethering at OS 3.0 launch)

Safari Mobile on iPhone gets support for HTTP streaming audio/video works through firewalls – auto-adjusts for your connection speed, javascript is 3x faster
Safari can also auto fill forms based on your contacts data plus there’s password autofill , HTML 5 support, support for video and audio tags
support more than 30 languages from korean, thai, arabic, greek, hebrew, all get added in OS 3.0

New “Find my iPhone” feature. “if you’ve ever lost or misplaced your phone, it can be traumatic”
Liz Lemon has used her iPhone to take “intimate” photos… and lost the phone. With find My iPhone is a MobileMe service you can log into MobileMe from any browser, and it will locate your iPhone on a map.

Sending a message to your iPhone makes it bleep, whether or not you left it in silent mode plus you can have an on-screen message show, with a number that you specify. In a worse-case scenario, you can remotely wipe it

“This is the most powerful, fastest iPhone ever made”. The iPhone 3G S.
The new iPhone has the same design as the 3G but 2.4x faster at games, messaging is 2.1x faster, excel 3.6x faster, nytimes loads are 2.9x faster, 3x faster javascript
Compared to iphone 3g, javascript scores in SunSpider at 15s for the 3GS, 43s for the 3G
It supports 7.2Mbps HSDPA and gets a new 3-megapixels camera with autofocus. Overall it’s roughly 2x faster than the iPhone 3G

They’ve also improved battery life with up to 5hrs 3g talktime, 9hrs of internet over WiFi, 10hrs of video playback, 30hrs audio, 12hrs 2g talktime
It is greener too, 23% smaller packaging

The iPhone 3GS is $199 for the 16GB version and $299 for the 32GB model. This are the AT&T prices for the US market. It comes in white and black.

iPhone 3G stays on the market for $99 starting from today. The iPhone 3GS available on June 19th. It’ll be available in over 80 countries by August. US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and UK get the iPhone 3GS on June 19th

Catch our full coverage of WWDC 2009 product announcement on SlashGear.com

Reviews of MacBook Pro/MacBook & iPhone 3GS coming soon on SlashGear.com

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