While Apple CEO Steve Jobs missed last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), he will be present at this year’s event. He will give the keynote in San Francisco on June 7 to launch the five-day event.
“Jobs has enthusiastically returned to his spot as the best pitchman in the country,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research to Computerworld. “He seems to be enjoying that role again.”
While the cat may already be out of the bag for the expected iPhone 4G announcement, there may be other surprises in store. “There were some implications in the last earnings call, and other clues, such as the shutdown of Lala, that there could be some announcements related to online,” said Gottheil. “The most likely is a subscription music or video streaming service. It wouldn’t quite fit in [with WWDC] unless there was something to be programmed. But if Apple were to provide a platform that interacts with code on one or more of their mobile devices, and offers some APIs [application programming interfaces], it would make sense.”
Other announcements could revolve around the front facing camera on the iPhone 4G. “Lots of people are using Skype for video calling, and a much smaller number is using high-end [technology] for video conferencing,” said Gottheil. “There’s a lot of potential in the middle. Apple could say, ‘Here’s basic video chat,’ then tell developers ‘Here are the APIs you can use to add video chat to your iPhone games.'”
Jobs, when recently asked by Gizmodo if Google had surpassed the iPhone with Android, simply responded, Not a chance.
