What's Coming at WWDC: New iPhone, New Apps and Snow Leopard

For Apple watchers, next week will -- if rumors are correct -- bring a host of reasons to rejoice.

The sold-out Worldwide Developer Conference, or WWDC, happening June 9-13 in San Francisco, is widely expected to be the venue at which company CEO Steve Jobs unveils a second-generation iPhone, a panoply of new applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a new MacBook Pro and the next upgrade to OS X, codenamed "Snow Leopard."

The highlight of the week will be Jobs' keynote, scheduled for 10 a.m. on Monday morning. Wired.com will be covering the WWDC keynote live on Gadget Lab.

After the keynote, Apple will take developers behind closed doors for a week of secret briefings. (Press are not invited to the conference sessions, and attendees are bound by a nondisclosure agreement.)

IPhone 2
Most hotly anticipated, of course, is the announcement of a new iPhone, which will probably include support for fast, 3-G wireless data and advanced geotagging features, if not outright GPS capability. As with other WWDC rumors, Apple has been characteristically close-mouthed about these details, refusing to confirm even the existence of a new iPhone. That hasn't stopped bloggers and journalists from engaging in iPhone mania, even going so far as to photograph incoming cargo shipments that may or may not contain new iPhones.

New iPhone Software, New Apps
The iPhone and iPod Touch operating system will also probably receive an upgrade to version 2.0, which, according to leaked shots of posters at the Moscone center, has been rebranded "OS X iPhone." The new OS will also likely include an App Store, integrated with iTunes, enabling users to purchase and install new software.

Apple's software development kit, or SDK, for the iPhone and iPod Touch has been in the wild for several months. Given what the developer community has achieved with the current iPhone, we can expect some exciting new toys. Programmers working with hacked iPhones have gotten their hooks deep into the OS, creating a video recorder, a Last.FM music streaming client and even an NES emulator. Now that an official development platform is available, look for Apple-sanctioned versions of applications like these to begin appearing next week.

It's also likely that users of first-generation iPhones will be able to upgrade their handsets with the new OS. Indie developer Gus Mueller of Flying Meat says, "Developers already have their hands full with the current iPhone as it is, [but] I would love to see GPS in an iPhone."

GPS support is the big question mark. The SDK has support for geotagging photos, which could help turn photo-sharing sites like Flickr into a giant mapping service for photographs. However, it's still unclear whether the new iPhone will contain a GPS unit or whether it will compute its location by triangulating WiFi hotspots and cell towers, as the current model does.

We could, too, see something like the Streetview overlay demonstrated in Google’s Android platform.

New MacBook Pro
There are other hardware expectations, too. One is a new MacBook Pro, the external design of which has remained almost unchanged since the PowerBook G4 back in 2001. Many people want a return to the form factor of the 12” PowerBook, but even if this doesn’t show, a little reorganization is needed. The Pro version is overshadowed by the consumer level MacBook with its new-style keyboard and user-changeable hard drive.

OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard
The rumors say that there is a possibility that Apple will preview OS X 10.6, or Snow Leopard, at the conference. It will drop support for the PowerPC-based Macs, possibly be 64-bit only and will be coming just months after the release of Leopard. According to reports, it will focus on performance enhancements and stability improvements -- two areas that Leopard, aka OS X 10.5, has been criticized for.

An Intel-only release would pave the way for Apple to drop PowerPC support altogether. It would be a controversial move: Many people argue that PowerPC G5 machines are still perfectly capable. However, Apple killed off OS 9 pretty quickly and does not have the best track record when it comes to supporting older hardware (Leopard already requires at least an 867 MHz or faster G4 chip).

It seems likely that moving to a pure 64-bit system would be more appealing to Apple than continuing to support the increasingly long-in-the-tooth PowerPC architecture.

What actually comes out of WWDC is still uncertain however. What we do know is that Jobs will make the most of his semiannual turn in the spotlight to focus as much hype and excitement on Apple's products as he can.