Early summer in San Francisco has a lot to offer a visitor; there are the famous landmarks, music festivals, stellar restaurants and endless outdoor activities. But for one group of out-of-towners June in the bay area means only one thing, the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC). This week long event calls the Apple faithful to the Mecca that is San Francisco's Moscone Center where the conference has been hosted since 2006. The WWDC is the smaller, nerdy brother to its more glamorous sister event, the Macworld Conference and Expo held at the same location in January. While Macworld is a huge tradeshow featuring hardware and has seen the unveiling of everything from iTunes to most recently the MacBook Air, WWDC is a series of seminars that tends to focus on the nuts and bolts programming that goes into the Mac OS and related applications. But recently the WWDC has gone more main stream in step with the company's growing profile as the world's most innovative computer maker; making this years’ event a sell-out for the first time ever. The increased participation and media coverage has led to several announcements, which would ordinarily have been considered Macworld territory, migrating to the keynote address that opens WWDC.

Consequentially the weeks leading up to CEO Steve Jobs keynote presentation have spawned Vegas style betting with techies vying to predict the announcements, some going far out on a limb while others playing it quite conservative. Last year's even was a letdown with the anticlimactic introduction of Safari for Windows rather than the much awaited iPod touch (you could hear the collective groan in the hall). This year the odds were firmly in favor of iPhone 3G. The fact that the current model was hobbling along virtually crippled by AT&T's EDGE data network in the age of much faster 3G and WiMAX options was one indicator that it was long due an upgrade if Apple hoped to compete with the Blackberry and Treo both already on the faster network. Another telltale sign was the fact that the first generation phone had been listed as unavailable for weeks on the online store and even retail locations were not restocking it. Lastly the decision to open up the platform to developers made it an almost sure bet that this would command the bulk of the limelight come Monday morning. And even rumors that Microsoft was planning on stealing the thunder by unveiling a Blu-ray Xbox 360 mere hours before the keynote did little to dampen the fervor.

I skipped this year's pilgrimage to Moscone West, having more pressing engagements in the Pacific to attend a twentieth anniversary celebration, and instead dispatched a somewhat over eager team to brave the crowds, imbibe bad coffee and keep me up to date with a blow by blow account. Here is the condensed report from my over caffeinated correspondents. Unlike Jobs I am not going to save the best for last, I mean most people just want to know is there a new iPhone or not. And if you put down any money betting that there would be, well you are about to collect, because there is. The newest installment of Apple's iconic device will be sleeker, faster and believe it or not, cheaper. The phone has slimmed down slightly at the edges and gets a full plastic back with metal buttons on the side. It retains its 3.5 inch screen and camera while adding a new flush headphone jack. But it's still large enough for people to ask "Is that an iPhone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"

The 3G predictions were spot on. Eschewing the crawl of EDGE, Apple jumped on the board with the rest of the world by finally introducing a UMTS/HSDPA and GSM phone that you can now use from almost where in the world. If you can afford to pay the ridiculous roaming charges that is. Moving to the zippier network means that you can load a webpage almost 3 times faster; Jobs demonstrated this by calling up the National Geographic homepage, a graphics intensive webpage which took 21 seconds on 3G as opposed to 59 seconds on EDGE. While most of us will not do serious browsing on the phone it means a huge jump in how fast you can get those email attachments downloaded. The battery has also gotten an overhaul. According to Jobs, 300 hours of standby, 3G talk time of 5 hours, 5 to 6 hours of high speed browsing, 7 hours of video and 24 hours of continuous audio. This is quite impressive when stacked up against other 3G phones like the Palm Treo 750.

One obstacle to Apple's plans of global domination and the establishment a new world order where everyone is enslaved to the iPhone was the glaring fact that other than a handful of territories in Europe like the UK, France and Germany most users were Stateside and considering that the fastest growing cellular market was the developing world outside the wealthy bastions of western Europe this oversight needed addressing. The price of the iPhone was the sticking point. Sure it had dropped since its debut price of $599 down to $399 for 8GB and $499 for 16 GB but this price point still put it well out of reach of the young professionals in tech savvy markets like India which is second only to China in the speed of its mobile user growth. So underpaid but status symbol hungry college students world-wide can rejoice because the price has been slashed once again this time by half. The iPhone 3G will be carrier subsidized, dropping in price to $199 for the 8 GB model and $299 for the 16 GB which will now also be available in white.

The Apple online store went offline an hour before the keynote fueling speculation that this was done to update it for sales of iPhone redux. But hopes that the new devices would be available as early as this week were dashed by the announcement that the worldwide rollout will not start till July 11 in 22 countries including the US, Australia, Canada, Mexico and Japan with India, Botswana and the rest to follow suit bringing the grand total to 70 countries. And though it plays host to the Summer Olympics this year China is still left out in the cold for now at least. The 2 week delayed rollout and unavailability of the previous model will result in the company's stock price taking a hit due to lost sales; Apple already dropped 7.08, or 3.8%, to $178.56 but look for that to pick up significantly next month.

There were other goodies like GPS, good news for the spatially challenged among us; an amusing demo tracked a phone as it moved down San Francisco's famously crooked Lombard street (the GPS feature spells a lot for location based advertising) and of course a bunch of applications were demonstrated. The first generation device was a personal phone, not at all business friendly but the new one boasts improved enterprise support like push e-mail, VPN and support for Microsoft Exchange. The iPhone 2.0 software platform also gets an overhaul now supporting all Microsoft Office and iWork documents. It will be released in early July as a free update to current iPhone owners but iPod touch owners will have to shell out $9.95 for the firmware update. The Software Developers Kit (SDK) that enabled developers to write apps for the device and the newly launched App Store took up quite a bit of the presentation. Since the introduction of the SDK thousands of intrepid developers have been churning out apps for the platform. They originated from big companies and solo developers and ranged from the obvious to the esoteric, like games from Sega and an auction manager from eBay to a music creation tool and even a couple of medical applications sure to be a hit with med school students. The App Store will allow developers to give away their applications for free or sell them for $9.99 after paying a $99 registration fee. Apple will of course get a cut of the proceeds. It appears the company wants to leverage the growing range of applications created exclusively for iPhone as a selling point to entice users of competitor devices like the Blackberry over to the Apple fold.

The 3G phone was not the only newcomer. Enter MobileMe, a replacement for the "too expensive for what it was" .Mac service and described by an Apple exec as Microsoft "Exchange for the rest of us". MobileMe will allow companies to centrally manage their employee email, contact lists and calendars and also give individuals the ability to control those same features across not only the Mac and iPhone platforms but also Windows XP and Vista. Adding a contact on your .Mac means the info is updated seconds later on your iPhone or PC using wireless networking. MobileMe integrates with iCal, Address and Mail on a Mac and Microsoft Outlook on a PC. When a user logs on to the service he can access his online storage on iDisk which has doubled in size to 20 GB (even more storage up to 40GB can be purchased) as well as a host of common apps like photos, mail, calendar etc. Users with existing .Mac accounts will be upgraded to MobileMe automatically while newcomers will be able to test drive the service for 60 days before deciding to pay the $99 annual fee.

But clearly this was a day for the iPhone and the rest of the week's events are almost superfluous in comparison. Apple's goal of moving 10 million units now looks like an understatement seeing that 6 million of the old version have been sold so far and the worldwide expansion and price cut is certain to inject some adrenaline into the bottom line. So while the disciples basked in the audience of the black turtleneck clad nerd god in San Francisco and looked forward to 5 more days of seminars the rest of the world patiently awaits its turn to be touched by the phenomenon that launched a thousand apps. So let's tally up the score card so far. 3G network, check; GPS capability, check; useful applications, check; affordable pricing, check. Now if they could get rid of that pesky single provider per country contract thingy it would be world domination, check.