Finally, at 11:35 (over an hour and a half later) the iPhone 3G is announced.  So far it doesn't look all that special.  An all plastic casing, slightly thinner, and 3G.  I'm going to do a little live blogging here to burn off some of that excitement energy while watching...

"the iPhone 3G is 36% faster than the nokia N95 and Treo 750" - Steve Jobs

Download times compared: Edge: 59 seconds, 3G: 21 seconds, WiFi: 17 seconds

Built-In GPS (as expected).  It uses all three (WiFi, Cell Towers and built in GPS) to calculate location.  If you leave the program open as you drive it shows a dotted line as you move along the map.

You know how you can tell its an Apple announcement?  When the Starbucks pereson comes over and instead of thinking you're crazy for continually pushing the F5 button she asks "Did he announce it yet?"

$199 for the 8Gb, $299 for the 16Gb...

Uh oh...July 11th Worldwide Rollout Date? 

Well, and that's about it.  I'm really disappointed now.  Not just that I couldn't buy one today but that there was no "surprise" feature.  No Video Chat.  No new Macbooks.  No "One More Thing...".  Nothing. 

Honestly, I thought I'd be so excited that I'd go buy something from the Apple store even if there was no iPhone today but this whole experience was kind of a downer.  2 hours with no surprise is pretty lackluster for an Apple announcement. 

For the record, I think I like live blogging (from people who are really good at it like Gizmodo and Engadget) more than live streaming. 

You get high quality pictures instead of grainy video, you get to walk away for a couple minutes and do other things without the risk of missing anything, and you get brief bits of commentary from people who have watched past announcement way closer than you have. 

Anyway, still no 3G iPhone

This is interesting.  Apparently Apple has decided to handle all Push communication themselves.  So applications can push data to an iPhone but they have to send it through Apple to do so.  The advantage of this is that only one program is running in the background (and I assume the unspoken advantage is that Apple can shut down an abusive server which should make it pretty  hard to create a "spam app" for the iPhone)

If there are no further updates beyond this point, you can just assume my head has exploded.  I realize this is a developer conference but they are on the 9th application demo at this point and its really getting tedious.

Some are kind of neat.  I'm not a big Baseball fan but MLB.com has an app that not only allows you to check scores but also watch clips which are available only minutes after the play happened (for those who don't know Major League Baseball has one of the most advanced back ends out there with each stadium wired with multiple cameras that all feed into servers that can disseminate them to web viewers)

But geez its been an hour already...

The problem with having a big announcement that everyone knows about is that it overshadows the rest of the presentation.  Right now they are going over items that, if not for the impending iPhone announcement, would be really fantastic. 

In particular Sega's entry into the iPhone market is really impressive (Engadget and Gizmodo are both putting up some awesome photos).

P.S.  Twitter is still up but Techcrunch has taken a dive.  How's that for irony. 

• It never occurred to me before now, but the iPhone 2.0 might not be the most exciting thing that comes out of today.  Three banners have caught my eye: "iPhone Simulator: Actual Results will not vary", "Accelerometer: Add new dimension to your apps.", and my personal favorite "Cocoa Touch:  Tap into the future".  Makes me think they'll open the doors to the Developer program to everyone. 
• I jumped over to Amazon to see if maybe they would accidentally list products before the announcement.  But it showed a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" message.  Clearly whatever  happened last week isn't over yet.

So, I've gone completely fanboy at this point.  I'm really not one of those "Apple People" but I did fall in love with my iPhone and that has led me to go a little gah-gah over the chance at a new and improved one.  As of right now, I'm like a kid on Christmas Eve unable to fall asleep before the big day.

I have to admit to feeling a little silly about it but it is nice to be excited about a tech product again.  As someone who largely lives in the PC World I don't get this kind of excitement much. 

Anyway, I thought I'd put up a quick post on my morning plan.  Basically, I'm going to camp out at a nearby Starbucks watching the announcement in whatever way possible (I don't think its being streamed but Techcrunch has already announced they'll be live blogging it and I suspect Engadget will do the same).  Then when I get some kind of confirmation that the new iPhones are going on sale today I'll rush over to my local Apple store to buy one.  I've provided this handy graphic to clarify the plan...

This is probably overkill since I only live about 15 miles away from the Apple store to begin with but I figure better safe than iPhone-less.  Because I'm on the West Coast I have one of the few Apple Stores that will be opening at the time of the announcement (10am PDT) so if they do go on sale today I'm not sure how they are going to handle that (Is Apple coordinated enough to have their store wait until the end of the announcement before putting them on sale?)

Anyway, hopefully it will be a pretty exciting morning all around.  There's still a risk that the new phones won't go on sale today but given reports that Apple Stores received new signs to be displayed I have to believe something is coming.

If worse comes to worse I'll just have to buy a MacBook Air or something to fill the void.  

(for the record, I sincerely doubt this will be my last entry for the day)