Steve Jobs sure to spring WWDC surprises, says analyst
Monday, May 24, 2010 17:18Apple CEO Steve Jobs will handle keynote duties at the company’s annual developers conference in two weeks, Apple confirmed today.
Jobs, who missed last year’s WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) because he was still on medical leave after a liver transplant, will take the stage in San Francisco on June 7 to launch the five-day event.
[ Stay up on tech news and reviews from your smartphone at infoworldmobile.com. | Get the best iPhone apps for pros with our business iPhone apps finder. | See which smartphone is right for you in our mobile "deathmatch" calculator. ]
“Jobs has enthusiastically returned to his spot as the best pitchman in the country,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research. “He seems to be enjoying that role again.”
Apple’s CEO returned to the public eye in September 2009, when he helped launch a refresh of the iPod line.
Almost everyone expects Apple’s top executive to not only tout the new iPhone OS 4 — WWDC will emphasize the mobile operating system — but to also unveil the next-generation iPhone hardware.
But there will be fewer iPhone surprises this year than in the past. In the last four weeks, photographs of two prototypes have appeared on the Internet, including those taken by the Gizmodo technology blog, which purchased a preview model from a California man for $5,000. More recently, a Vietnamese forum posted photos of a what one hardware expert described as a production, or near-production iPhone .
That doesn’t mean Jobs won’t have some surprises up his sleeve when he takes the stage at WWDC, said Gottheil.
“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.”
Apple acquired Lala late last year, but will shutter the small music streaming service as of May 31.
While WWDC might not seem like the ideal platform to make such an announcement — the event typically focuses on matters that directly relate to developers — Gottheil sees an opening. “It wouldn’t quite fit in [with WWDC] unless there was something to be programmed,” acknowledged Gottheil. “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.”
