Pundits were wondering what surprises Steve Jobs had in store morning at his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference.
In the end, there were few. Jobs did what expected and introduced the next iPhone, which he called iPhone 4. It will have a higher-resolution screen, a longer battery life and is a much thinner design.
A bigger surprise was hoped for and expected especially after Jobs was upstaged by the now infamous leaks of the fourth generation iPhone.
The first leak came of course after a celebratory Apple engineer left his iPhone in a Redwood City bar and it ended up on Gizmodo. The second leak - the one that has Apple internal security livid - came from a Vietnamese tech blogger who took the phone apart online.
There was a technical glitch during the presentation that was a surprise. Jobs was trying to show off the new look of the Web pages, but couldn't because there were too many people in the room clogging the wireless network. He tried more than once to fix it, but the page would not load. "Well jeez, I don't like this," Jobs said. He only has himself to blame. Dollars to donoughts most of the space was taken by people on iPads and iPhones.
The strange truth though, is Apple actually doesn't have that many surprises ever.
Reporters certainly knew they were going to see the very first iPhone when they showed up to MacWorld in January 2007. A little more than a year later, they knew they'd see a faster iPhone. A video camera on an iPod Nano was blogged about far ahead of time. Everyone seemed to know ahead of time iTunes would offer movie rentals, and of course the iPad was talked about long before it was announced.
That said, there have been a few surprises.
The phrase Jobs likes to use prior to something really big is, "Just one more thing... "
Few people thought Apple would call its slate computer the iPad, and while we all expected a small netbook like computer, no one predicted how beautiful the MacBook air would be. The functionality of MobileMe was a pleasant surprise (unfortunately so too was Apple's near abandonment of it later).
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Bloggers say some "surprises" to look out for today might include a silly reprise of the "I'm a Mac" commercial poking fun at the lost iPhone, a re-imagined Apple TV, and a new trackpad add-on.
Below is where you will find video updates, streamed live from the keynote speech via NBC Bay Area's Scott Budman's Qik feed.
He's also sending out updates via Twitter @scottbudman
Scott McGrew's first computer was an Apple II+. His dad bought it for him back in 1981
