iphoneLike many others today I followed live blogging of the Apple world wide developer conference today. Everyone anxiously awaited the moment when Mr. Jobs would announce the existence of the next generation device. He did not disappoint. I’ve followed most of the rumors leading up to the event. Most of them turned out to be true, including the fact that the new phone will be a full $200 less than the 1st gen. iPhone. That’s right, $199 bones will pick you up an 8 gig white or black iPhone starting on July 11, only $299 for a 16 gig. The new features and price point will all but guarantee a market share sure to have the competition scared to death. My wife’s Sprint contract is up and they tried calling her 3 times today to renew. They usually call once a week. It’s not just the consumer impact either. Apple is taking a shot right to the midships of many companies who sell enterprise mobile solutions.

New Features Overcome Old Objections
Price was the biggest objection. Apple didn’t stop there. The phone now supports Microsoft Exchange, which has been one of the biggest issues I have heard from folks who wanted to get an iPhone but could not use it to get their corporate mail. Problem solved. The other huge objection? AT&T’s edge network for connectivity. It’s painfully slow. The new iPhone, as expected is a 3G capable phone. GPS is also a big new feature.

.Mac To Be Replaced With MobileMe
mobile meApple also announced a total revamp of their Internet service to be branded as Mobile Me and it’s all about the iPhone. Apple is calling it “Exchange for the rest of us.” Essentially it uses the cloud to keep all of your devices at home, work and on your iPhone always in Sync. It carries all of the standard features of the .Mac service including email, 20 gigs of iDisk space, calendar, gallery, contacts and more. The re-branding is clearly designed to capture PC users as well. With the success of the Halo Effect that iPhone sales have had on Mac market share, this move is should do well continue that.

3rd Party Apps and Application Support
Support for Apple’s IWork suite of business applications and support for the entire MS Office suite (including power point) will be included in the 2.0 iPhone OS. Third party applications will be available for download in a new App Store section in iTunes. By opening up the development of iPhone applications to third parties I think you will start to see some really innovative things in the near future.

What do you think of the next gen efforts of Apple with iPhone? Do you plan on buying your first iPhone? If you have one already, will you be replacing it with a new right away? Do you think with these innovations that the iPhone will become the Realtor phone of choice? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Update Wed 6/10: A video of the WWDC Keynote is up at Apple.Com