For those existing customers who are going in expecting to be able to acquire this at the subsidy price at $199 for the 16 GB and $299 for the 32 GB, you had better check to see if you qualify to actually get the iPhone 3GS at the discounted price. You can check by either calling *639# on your existing phone (you should receive a message stating that you do), call AT&T or check your online account. Don’t forget that AT&T will be trying to charge you an $18 “upgrade price”. With some smooth talk, you may be able to get yourself out of it. AT&T is, also, extending the upgrade to customers who have purchased their iPhone 3G in July, August, or September 2008, but be sure to check with the AT&T before you go in and realize that you were not eligible and had to pay the early upgrade price of $399 for the 16 GB or $499 for the 32 GB.

Many Apple and AT&T stores will be opening an hour early to fulfill many of the pre-orders at 7 AM, be sure to call ahead. There will also be many devices on hand for individuals, but at a first come-first serve basis only. Also be aware that the early pre-orders did sell out, so if you are expecting to see one at your doorstep on July 19th when you didn’t jump the gun in time, don’t be surprised if you don’t see it tomorrow. Apple has also requested that carriers hold their shipments until tomorrow for those who have pre-ordered, some may be lucky and have theirs ship a day or two early, but all reports indicate that it won’t. It’ll be a waiting game for that man in the brown tomorrow. With this useful information on hand, be safe and enjoy your shiny new gadget!!

AT&T deets here

Some Reviews below:

Engadget – Josh Topolsky

Gizmodo – Jason Chen

WSJ – Walt Mossberg

NYTimes – Dave Pogue

Wired – Steven Levy

USA Today – Ed Baig

CNET – Kent German

iPhone 3GS

There was much speculation on what the new iPhone would have and what would actually change, from having a rubberized/matte back finish to having a front video camera for video conferencing. Sadly, there were no outside cosmetic changes. All the changes dealt with what was inside, both the hardware and software.

Hardware changes:

Unfortunately, Apple wouldn’t reveal the details of the new hardware specifications, just that it was “twice as fast” as the iPhone 3G, leading many people to believe it has double the amount of RAM and, possibly, a slight processor speed bump. We won’t find out until someone gets their hands on this thing come June 19th and does a full teardown.

The much awaited addition of in-house video recording, editing, straight uploads to Youtube will now be standard in the iPhone 3GS, sorry iPhone 3G users this is an iPhone 3GS feature only. The camera will also see an upgrade from the non-autofocus 2 megapixel lens to a 3 megapixel autofocus camera that can record video at a resolution of 640 x 480 at 30 fps. Although, the iPhone 3G is actually capable of recording video (as long as it was jailbroken), for whatever reason, Apple has made it a feature of the iPhone 3GS only. It will also have a special macro mode and the ability to geotag both your video and photos.

The iPhone 3GS can also support a max downspeed of 7.2Mps, as long as the cell provider can support those speeds that is, which AT&T is not one of them. Small changes also include, the support for Bluetooth 2.1, an anti-fingerprint coating, built-in Nike+, voice control, and a slight increase in battery life.

Late addition, I was able to find a detailed article from one of my favorite hardcore tech sites AnandTech on the new CPU/GPU, which is, ironically, the same one in the Palm Pre, an ARM Cortex A8 with a PowerVR SGX GPU with a clock speed of 600 MHz and 256 MB of RAM.

My personal favorite update is the addition of the digital compass. GPS on phones has been a welcomed addition, but I have never been able to tell which direction I would actually need to walk. I would always need to walk a few feet before I knew if I was going the right way. This fixes that, telling you the exact direction of where you would need to walk. Small change, but one that makes this lost soul follow the right path.

Software:

With the announcement of the iPhone 3GS comes the official announcement of iPhone OS X 3.0. I have been using the beta, now in GM, for the past month or so and it brings some nice additions (some that should have been in 1.0), such as universal search, a landscape keyboard, MMS and tethering

Some caveats, although 3.0 finally enables MMS and tethering (it was also available in the betas other than beta 5), that’s going to be up to your cell carrier. So if you’re in the US and on AT&T, it won’t be ready come June 19th. AT&T is blaming it on network limitations and they’re still trying to figure out pricing, both pretty lame excuses seeing as all the other carriers around the world are well prepared for it and both have been available for years now. I’ve been able to send and receive MMS’s on my Bold since I got it, which was at launch on AT&T. Apple is planning on an iPhone 3.0 OS release on June 17th, so be prepared for a software upgrade soon you iPhone owners.

$99 iPhone 3G:

In my opinion, this is probably Apple’s most earth shattering announcements of the entire keynote. All speculation was that Apple was going to release a 4 GB lower price model, the $99 iPhone rumor started way back even before last year’s MacWorld. It brings the iPhone to level of affordability to almost anyone who wants it. I’m gonna predict market saturation of iPhones will come rather quickly now.

Other hardware announcements:

New Macbook Pros:

The 13″ aluminum Macbook is probably Apple’s fastest product to go obsolete, announced in October 18, 2008 at MacWorld, only lasting a mere eight months. But all’s good, as Apple decided to up the ante on the specs that were on that Macbook model by adding some extra battery life, though with a non-removable battery, a media card reader, and cut the price a few hundred dollars and dubbing it with the Macbook Pro moniker. Other than the glossy screen and the chicklet style keyboard, I’m pretty psyched to see this model out. It may very well be my next computer purchase. Interesting tidbit, you can apparently boot from a flash card. Oh and Apple is drastically cutting prices on the aluminum Macbook, most likely to clear stock for the new Macbook Pro models.

Other software announcements:

Official announcement of Snow Leopard, but without the cool new Marble UI, as well as a new iLife ‘09 update. The cost is an update edition to Snow Leopard is $29 and $49 for a family pack, down from the $129 cost that was for Leopard. For those who don’t know what Snow Leopard is, it’s one of those dot upgrades Apple has been pushing out since the release of OS X, but 10.6 focuses more on the background enhancements and performance tuning. Enhancements include 45% faster install, a reduction in 6 GB of disk space, more support for 64-bit applications, parallel processing, Microsoft Exchange support, new interface for Quicktime, as well as the use of the hardware acceleration via the GPU, a new dock and expose. Sorry all you PowerPC Mac users, this is for Mactels only. Safari 4.0 finally falls out of beta and into your desktops, all the details here. Some interesting notes on Safari 4, it gets 100/100 from the Acid3 test, has HTML 5 support, CSS 3 web font support, a new Javascript rendering engine, is supposed to be the fastest browser ever, built-in web developer tools and cover flow integration.

What wasn’t announced:

The Apple tablet, why? I honestly don’t think the world is ready for it and it probably wouldn’t be much of a big seller for Apple. Contrary to what most people believe, not all of Apple’s products sell well, take a look at the Apple TV, the Macbook Air or the Newton. Tablets, also, don’t do very well with the mainstream and if Apple is going to make this a multi-touch screen, which they would most likely do, it would render it useless to graphic designers needing more precise pen input from a digitizer a la the Wacom. For all of those who want your own Apple tablet and have that extreme dough to spend, jump over to Axiotron and grab a Modbook, which is essentially a Macbook modded with a digitized Wacom screen sans the keyboard, pricing is $1249 if you would like to mod your existing Macbook or a starting price of $1569 for your very own freshly modded Macbook with very barebones specs.

Matte/rubberized back on the iPhone:

All the rumors and leaks out there centered around one new design, but was ultimate proven wrong with the announcement of the iPhone 3GS. The speculation is that Apple or AT&T put out a “fake” FCC filing and photos to deter or spur on much of the hype and rumors going into WWDC. Others think that this was an early design that Apple scraped for whatever reason. It’s a shame that this one didn’t come true because that matte finish device was starting to win me over.

Front Video Camera:

I’m going to have to say this was AT&T’s fault. Video chatting and streaming is a pretty data intensive application, especially for AT&T extremely spotty service. I have a feeling that this wasn’t even a reasonable feature for AT&T and it was killed very early on.

Afterthoughts:

Before Apple officially announced that they were going to create a phone, many of your traditional phone companies waved them away, saying how this PC vendor doesn’t understand the mobile phone market. Two years later, the iPhone is quickly becoming as synonymous as its iPod is. Mobile computing is drastically changing the way we go about our day to day lives. Apple understood that and knew that the traditional form factors wasn’t really cutting it and threw everything out and started from scratch. With a melding of fresh UI design paradigms and Apple’s own view of simplicity and slick designs, Apple won over many converts, including myself. Apple’s game changer mentality is forcing all those around them to innovate or die and pushing manufacturers to one up each other. I’m hoping to see that many manufacturers don’t falter and fail under the pressure and create truly innovative devices. Palm is the first one to actually create a device/OS that rivals Apple’s own, I’m hoping I’ll see other manufacturers follow. The future in the mobile computing world is at its beginning stages and is one to watch.

Read more here, here and here.

Of course, everyone is expecting the announcement of a brand new iPhone. The leaked pictures is supposedly of an iPhone with a matte back finish, looks slightly thinner, has a faster processor, twice the RAM, with twice the amount of storage at  16 GB and 32 GB capacities. The new iPhone is supposed to feature a front camera with the ability to record video, a feature that was not available on either the iPhone 2G or 3G models. It’s also rumored that with the launch of the new iPhone will come the official annoucement of the iPhone 3.0 OS, which has been in beta stages for developers since last year. Features of the 3.0 OS will include universal search, push notifications, Internet tethering, MMS and video/voice recording.

Other rumors include, Apple releasing a smaller 4 GB capacity iPhone for those who do not need the extra storage space, lowering the cost for those who have wanted an iPhone, but could not afford one.

As far as non-iPhone rumors go, Snow Leopard is expected to have its official announcement, but the Marble UI is not expected to be included in this announcement.

There are, also, rumors of Apple finally releasing an official tablet with multi-touch, so think of it as a much larger iPhone.

The Macbook Pro line is to get a slight refresh to its line with the possibility of a built-in 3G modem and flash card slots.

Finally, Steve Jobs is supposed to make his triumphant return back to Apple.

With the recent launch of the Palm Pre, you can’t help but think that Apple will be stealing much of Sprint’s and Palm’s thunder come 1 PM today. I am decidedly pretty excited in whatever Apple will be announcing this afternoon.

Read more here, here, here, and here.

Plenty of sites are live blogging the keynote. If you would like to follow along , go here, here, here or here.