July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Windows Phone 8 users who just want to see a stream of random, but curated content need to look no further. Tumblr is finally here.

It’s all mobile for Tumblr these days. The company launched its Windows Phone 8 app today, shortly after revamping its Android version.

Where previously the Tumblr app was only available on iOS and Android, today’s news opens the “post anything” blogging site to a whole new host of phones.

The app is connected to the phone’s voice assistant. You can speak your posts and Tumblr will obediently (we hope) record the thoughts. It also shows content from the Tumblrs you follow on the live tiles, or the ever-changing home screen box graphics, as well as the lock screen. Of course, you’ll be able view gifs on the app as well as take photos from it.

It’s obvious Tumblr is focusing energy on its mobile side. The company recently released an update to its Android app that includes a playful revamp to its activities menu. Options to post videos, images, links, quotes, photos, text, as well as to chat appear to be spring-loaded, popping out of the bottom right corner of the app. This was done on purpose, since that corner is the easiest place to poke the screen with your thumb.

We don’t get that same, lively feel from the Windows Phone 8 app, however. Those working on the Android app likely have more resources than those working on Windows Phone 8. Android still holds the top spot on mobile marketshare charts, making it a much wider audience for Tumblr to target.

The app is available now from the Windows Phone App Store.

Tumblr app image via Microsoft

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

As the rise of Siri and its competitors has shown, voice control has become a huge part of how we interact with mobile devices. So you shouldn’t be too surprised that Google is bringing voice control to the desktop as well.

With the latest Chrome beta, Google is giving developers some big new voice-centered tools that will allow them to integrate speech recognition into their web apps.

There are a lot of pretty obvious applications for the functionality, which will eventually allow Chrome users to dictate search queries, documents, and other text inputs. While there’s not much new ground being broken there, it won’t be long until developers figure out other, more interesting uses for the new voice API.

Google has been making a lot of headway with voice search as of late, having introduced its voice-focused Search app for iOS in October. (VentureBeat’s John Koetsier was a big fan of the release.)

To get a better idea of how Chrome’s voice recognition will look, watch the video below.

Siri is an idiot savante, sometimes more savante, and sometimes more idiot: she didn’t know where Washington DC is. Google, on the other hand, seems to have a bigger brain.

Siri does have two advantages. First, she has deep knowledge in a few select areas. And second, she remembers history, so she evaluates current questions in context. (That can be a good thing and a bad thing, as I found when I asked about traffic conditions to Vancouver, BC. I had previously asked about things to do in Vancouver, and to this traffic question Siri told me that the Canucks-Red Wings game had been cancelled.)

Google seems to be smarter, to know more.

Part of that might be because when Google doesn’t have the answer and it defaults to a web search, that seems very normal, versus when Siri defaults to web search (errr … Wolfram Alpha search) it seems like an option of last resort. But part of that is that Google just knows more — its massive knowledge graph is a cumulative result of 15 years of data gained from countless trillions of search queries in an effort to essentially emulate a Star Trek artificial intelligence experience.

Both fared well on some standard factual questions, in a sense. But oddly, Siri picked out the British version of The Office, while Google selected the U.S. version:

Source: John Koetsier

Siri vs Google: the cast of The Office

Another simple one: the time in a different time zone. Both answer correctly, with Siri adding a little more personality, and possibly, the start of a contextual conversation:

Source: John Koetsier

Siri vs Google: the time somewhere else

Google, with the wealth of data riding on its shoulders, is fairly confident when it gives you results. The results may sometimes not be extremely helpful, though they usually are, but they are always delivered definitively.

Siri, on the other hand, is sort of like an unsure teenager, who ends every sentence trailing up in tone, transmuting statements into questions. When Siri isn’t sure, she checks Wolfram Alpha and gives you an answer with a conditional: this “might” answer your question:

Source: John Koetsier

What is a curveball? Both have the answer, though Siri’s not too sure …

In other cases, Siri is more idiot than savante, it must be said. For instance, any app purporting to help users search and navigate the world of information should know what Washington DC is, and how to find it.

Google does, and provides a map with directions. Siri, unfortunately, is painfully clueless:

Source: John Koetsier

How could you not know where Washington, DC is, Siri?

Siri’s lack of real, deep knowledge about the world is evident in other typically search-engine-style questions about companies and people.

In this case, Siri does not know who the CEO of Apple is, and rather schoolmarmishly tells me that everything I need to know about Apple is at Apple’s website. (As a journalist who focuses on Apple coverage, I just might beg to differ a little.)

Source: John Koetsier

Siri, you should really know the CEO of the company you work for …

But in areas where Siri has been directly connected to a deep source of specific data on a certain set of questions, she shines, giving detailed, information-rich, even visual answers.

Such as stock quotes:

Source: John Koetsier

A little insider tip, please …

That includes Yelp-assisted categories such as local search, where Siri has access to rich and detailed information on local restaurants, events, and entertainment. Google, on the other hand, is unhelpfully responding to a search by giving me more search options to continue search in. Sorry, I’m searching to find, not searching to search.

(Note the vestiges of skeuomorphic design in Siri’s answer.)

Source: John Koetsier

Thanks for giving me search engines in response to a search, Google

One key difference where Siri has the potential to shine: context. Siri knows what you’ve just asked, and so you can build a chain of searches and steps to accomplish a task.

For example, you can ask Siri to send an email, and she’ll ask for the name of the recipient, and, in a subsequent step, the message itself, meaning that you can accomplish a complex series of actions without feeling like you need to do it all at once. Google can’t help you at all with those sorts of tasks at the moment, although apps like Edwin, Vlingo, Speaktoit, and Samsung’s S Voice can accomplish various parts of what Siri does.

In search, context helps too (even if Siri doesn’t always do the right thing with it):

Source: John Koetsier

Context helps … but that’s not the Four Seasons I was thinking of

This is of course not an exhaustive list … but it does highlight some of the differences.

Based on the results, and my preconceptions and prejudices, if I had to pick a personal assistant to help me do things on my phone, I’d pick Siri, of course. But if I had to pick one app for web search and information retrieval, I’d have to go with Google.

And frankly, given the data that Google has at its disposal, it’s hard to see how Apple can win this one.

I think if Apple was completely cold-blooded and logical about this, they’d partner with Google for search results in Siri, not Wofram Alpha, and they’d focus Apple-specific Siri enhancements on strong vertical partnerships with services like Yelp and OpenTable and airline reservations, as well as specifically phone control tasks.

That would, of course, be a seriously naive strategy. Which doesn’t mean it would be wrong.

photo credit: Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com) via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

In an effort to cut driving distractions even further, the crowdsourced driving app Waze today has added the ability for fully hands-free voice control to report traffic situations — bringing Siri-like functionality to the free app before Apple has released its own Siri API.

Waze’s solution is actually more advanced than Siri in one key way: you don’t need to awkwardly hold down any buttons to activate voice commands. Instead, Waze’s voice controls are activated simply by waving your hand over the iPhone’s screen while driving. Waze uses the iPhone’s proximity sensor to enable this functionality, and as you can see in the video below, it’s a particularly nifty gesture.

Once activated, you can speak commands to Waze like “report traffic,” which will let you give an account of the traffic ahead, or you can change your route by telling the app to “Drive home.” The company is utilizing the open source API OpenEars to power its voice controls, but it’s open to moving to an official Siri API when Apple makes it available.

Waze’s free apps, which are available on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian phones, offers free turn-by-turn directions. But Waze’s true value is its vast amount of live traffic data. Crowdsourced entirely from its users, the data makes Waze a far more useful alternative to standalone GPS units.

Waze VP Community Geographer DiAnn Eisnor tells me that they’ve been working on the hands-free feature, which has been one of the most requested from its rabid fanbase of 12 million users, for months. The company too found the feature important, as it will remove yet another major distraction for drivers while using its app. Waze has also disabled text input in the app while your car is in motion, which will discourage drivers from focusing too much on their phones.

The updated Waze app does take advantage of Siri when it comes to more complex voice controls, like looking up a specific address or local business, but it seems to just be using Siri’s dictation capabilities. The update also includes the ability to share your destination and ETA, and so you can tell your friends when you’re going to be late.

The voice control feature will first appear on the Waze iPhone app, mainly because it was the idea of Waze’s core iPhone engineer. It’ll hit other platforms eventually.

Waze is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has raised over $55 million thus far.

This voice-control API gives developers a free platform for writing voice-activated commands for web applications, including navigation, social media, maps, calendars and more.

Zypr comes from the folks at Pioneer, makers of many fine home and automotive consumer electronics. The company says Zypr is designed to work across mobile devices, web apps, consumer electronics devices and automotive information and entertainment systems.

One of the most interesting and valuable aspects of the Zypr API is that it aggregates third-party APIs from services like Facebook and Amazon, categorizes their functions (for example, social, mapping or shopping) and presents those functions through a single, normalized API, creating a stable access point for devices and apps. If a third-party API changes, the developer using Zypr doesn’t need to make any changes to his or her code. Pioneer says that Zypr can replace around 80 percent of the functionality of the APIs it supports.

For end users, Zypr creates a single sign-on and unified service profile that works across multiple devices.

But perhaps most interestingly today, Zypr gives developers natural-language voice control for all services, regardless of provider or category. And it’s entirely OS agnostic.

In a blog post announcing Zypr’s launch, the company says that Zypr’s “normalized, stable and voice-enhanced method” will act as a buffer between developers and the constantly swirling seas of web service APIs. Pioneer says Zypr-powered applications will let data follow an app’s users across multiple devices.

Zypr is an ad-supported service and offers developers revenue-sharing opportunities.

For your reference, dear developer, Pioneer has provided some sample code in the form of a Zypr-powered Java app, which you can check out now on Github. There’s also a fair amount of documentation to sort through.

Image courtesy of colorblindpicaso.

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

—

In Star Trek IV, Scotty picks up a computer mouse and speaks into it, trying to get the machine’s attention. “Computer! Computer!” When nothing happens, someone tells him to use the keyboard. “How quaint,” is his bemused response.

You might feel the same way in 10 years, if someone hands you a computer without a voice interface. That’s because we’re on the verge of an explosion in interactive, interpretive computer voice control.

“The technology is just beginning,” said Norman Winarsky, the head of the venture arm of SRI, a legendary Silicon Valley think tank. “This is real artificial intelligence and real technology.”

Winarsky was talking to me about Siri, the voice-commanded assistant built into the iPhone 4S and the most impressive part of Apple’s product introduction on October 4. With Siri, you can speak to your phone and ask it to read your most recent messages, make an appointment on the next free spot in your calendar, tell you what $50 amounts to in euros, or point you in the direction of the nearest pizza parlor. You can even give it instructions like “Remind me to call my wife when I leave work,” and because Siri knows both who your wife is and where you work, it will do so, prompting you to call the correct number when you start to leave your office building.

Siri originated at SRI, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg, Winarsky told me. He expects many similar “virtual personal assistants” to emerge in the near future. (He recently called Siri’s launch a world-changing event.)

“Your virtual personal assistant is going to evolve rather rapidly,” Winarsky said.

Siri is more than just a voice dialer or voice command system; it’s built upon an artificial intelligence engine that allows it to interpret what you’re saying, deliver relevant results from various applications and online services, and even engage in rudimentary conversations with you.

Although researchers have been working on artificial intelligence for decades, it hasn’t produced particularly impressive results until recently. One of the reasons that Siri is able to work effectively now is that the iPhone has sufficient processing power and memory onboard, and it has a reasonably fast wireless connection to online resources that it needs to access to provide relevant answers. In a way, like Marvin the Paranoid Android in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Siri actually has a brain the size of a planet.

The technology is not likely to remain an Apple exclusive for long.

Siri came out of a DARPA-funded, $180 million, five-year research project called CALO that was led by SRI. Other institutions were involved, including MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Berkeley. As the research project wound up, SRI began considering how it could spin the technology out into a commercial venture, as it does with many of its most successful research projects.

Siri was spun out from SRI as an independent startup in January 2008, with venture funding led by Gary Morgenthaler of Morgenthaler Ventures and Sean Carolan of Menlo Ventures. A second round of funding brought in Solina Chau of Horizons Ventures. In February, 2010 Siri launched its first product, an iPhone app, and then in April of the same year Apple acquired the company. (The terms were not publicly disclosed, although Silicon Valley buzz had it that Apple paid more than $200 million.)

Winarsky was careful to emphasize that he has no insight into Apple’s product plans for Siri or for any developments to the technology that have happened since Siri disappeared beyond Apple’s event horizon in early 2010. However, he has a good sense of Siri’s background and the potential directions it could take.

“Apple has the ability to use that interface across all its apps,” Winarsky said. So while Siri is integrated into the messaging, calendar and email apps, Winarsky thinks it’s reasonable to expect that Apple will also integrate it into music and movies, adding a layer of personalization so that Siri begins to learn your preferences.

Moreover, it could work with any Apple device. Right now it’s restricted to the iPhone 4S, but when Siri launched, it was running on the iPhone 3GS, which means that, in theory, any current device could support it, including the iPhone 4, the iPad, and for that matter the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. The result might look a bit like the “Knowledge Navigator” that Apple confidently predicted in a 1987 promotional video.

Eventually, Winarsky hypothesizes that Apple will provide a Siri API (application programming interface) so that app developers can make their own apps interact with you through Siri’s voice-controlled dialogs.

Expect other companies to develop virtual personal assistants as well. Google has already implemented voice-recognition and voice-command capabilities into Android, called Voice Actions, although with a more restricted vocabulary than Siri. But you can bet that Google’s engineers aren’t going to take this challenge lying down.

Meanwhile, SRI has already created a second spinoff company based on CALO research called Trapit, which monitors web sites and news feeds to deliver content to you based on your preferences.

Another company I spoke with, Expertmaker, is also using artificial intelligence to produce better search results and help people find what they want on very large e-commerce sites.

“This is fertile territory. No one can capture AI any more than they can capture math or physics,” said Winarsky.

Winarsky has a vivid imagination for the kinds of tasks that virtual personal assistants could accomplish. For instance, they could be used in airline call centers. Instead of talking to human operators or navigating painful interactive voice-response menus, you could ask something like “Get me a flight on United from San Francisco to New York, in business class, at about 3pm tomorrow.”

It could respond, “There’s nothing at 3pm, how about 4pm?” And if you replied, “4pm won’t work, but 2pm would,” the system would understand enough about the context of the conversation to make the booking.

Similarly, VPAs could act as life coaches. You might crave a grilled cheese sandwich and ask a nutrition app on your phone for advice on whether your diet permits that. It would be able to give you the estimate of the number of calories and suggest that, if you eat the grilled cheese now, you might need to skip dessert after dinner tonight.

Let’s hope that doesn’t give Siri a complex, when we use her vast brainpower to solve ridiculously mundane human problems.

Photo of Marvin: meddygarnet/Flickr. Photo of Norman Winarsky courtesy SRI.

Note: Last week, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs passed away. The news hit me harder than I thought it would, even though we’d all been expecting this moment. It turns out that I have a huge debt in my heart for the man who helped create the Apple II, the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad. So, this week I’d like to point you to a few of VentureBeat’s tributes to this legendary icon of Silicon Valley, who we will all miss.

• Steve Jobs made a dent in the universe
  I wrote this short obituary and tribute to the man who made a huge difference to Silicon Valley and the world.
• Steve Jobs’ death reminds Silicon Valley that it needs to remember its history
  Dean Takahashi takes the long view, reminding us that we need leaders who understand history.
• 10 important products Steve Jobs helped bring to the world
  Sean Ludwig summarizes the ten most significant product introductions Jobs made possible.
• Steve Jobs’s most ambitious product: Apple Inc.
  I wrote this post in August when Jobs retired, making the argument that the company he built is his most successful design.

And finally, I’d like to point you to a heartfelt tribute video produced by Wired’s Gadget Lab, in which Wired staffers (and former staffers, including me) talk about what Apple and Jobs meant to their lives.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

We’re here at Apple’s Cupertino campus for its latest iPhone unveiling. The keynote event, led by new Apple CEO Tim Cook, is scheduled to begin in a few minutes at 10am Pacific time.

Apple has unfortunately decided not to livestream the event, so dispatches from bloggers in the auditorium will be the main way that the news gets out. We’ll try to type as fast as humanly possible, and the rest of the VentureBeat team will pick up on the news and explain it as thoroughly as possible as well.

Keep an eye on this post for live updates from the event.

10:05 Apple chief executive Tim Cook has taken the stage.

“This is my first prod launch since being named CEO,” Cook says. “I’m sure you didn’t know that. I love Apple. I consider it a privilege of a lifetime to be here.”

This is the location where Apple launched the iPod 10 years ago, Cook says. It’s also where the new Macbook Air launched one year ago.

10:08 Cook talks about Apple’s success opening new stores. Two new stores opened in China in the past week, one in Shanghai and one in Hong Kong. The Shanghai store had 100,000 visitors in its first weekend.

10:10 Customers love Lion. 10 percent of their customers upgraded within two weeks. It tooks Windows 7 20 weeks to hit 10%, Cook says.

10:11 The new MacBook Air is “thin and light and beautiful and wicked fast. Our customers love it and our competitors have been trying to copy it.”

Apple has the number 1 best selling notebook. It’s also got the best desktop, Cook says. Mac sales grew 23% last 4 quarters. PC growth, by comparison, was 4 %. “Every single quarter for 5 years the Mac has outcgrown the PC market.” There are 58 million users of macs now.

In U.S. retail stores, Macs are  one of four PCs sold in stores, giving it 23% market share.

10:15 Next is music. The iPod launched just 10 years ago. It’s now the number 1  music player, with 78 percent market share. It’s been above 70 percent for a very long time. The iPod has sold 300 million over time.

It took Sony 30 years to sell 220 million Sony cassette players.

In the last year ending June, we sold 45 million iPods. Almost half of those are going to people who are buying their first iPod.

iTtunes is the number 1 store, with 16 billion songs downloaded.

10:17 The iPhone 4 in a very short period of time has sold over half of the total iPhones sold the total time we have been selling. It has become the No. 1 smartphone in the world. the iPhone’s year-over-year growth has been 125 percent.

93 percent of Fortune 500 companies are testing the iPhone.

No. 1 in customer satisfaction, according to ChangeWave. 70 percent are very satisfied or better. Nokia is 21 percent.

6 years in a row, J.D. Power rated the iPhone the number 1 smartphone. But it has 5 percent share of the worldwide market for mobile phones.

We look at the entire market for handsets because over time all of the market becomes smart phones. It’s an enormous opportunity.

10:19 95% satisfied now with iPad. they are showing up everywhere. iPads in schools help kids learn in amazing new ways.

We believe they help kids learn and educators believe that too.

1,000 schools have a one to one program. all states have an iPad program. 1,000 universities across the U.S. — Stanford etc. — all have iPad programs. Pilots are using them to replace 40 pound flight bags.

92% of Fortune 500 are using iPads.

Despite everybody and their brother trying to compete with the iPad, three out of four tablets sold in the U.S. are iPads.

250 million iOS devices sold to date.

10:22 Scott Forstall, the senior vice president of iOS software, takes the stage.

18 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store overall. Customers are now downloading 1 billion apps per month. Apple has paid devs $3 billion for those apps.

One new app today is Cards. You can create cards and print them out (thank you cards, etc.). Apple prints the cards and sends them off.

10:27 Now we’re going to hear about iOS 5. 100,000 developers are already using it. It comes with 200 new user features (introduced a few months back). Features like a new notification center, so notifications no longer interrupt your game.

iMessages are pushed to all your devices so you can pick up on any device. 3G and Wi-Fi are supported. It’s securely encrypted end to end.

A brand new app is Reminders, for dry cleaning pick up reminders, etc. You can set up a geofence around where you are at work and once you leave it reminds you.

10:29 Twitter integration “We have integrated Twitter deeply into the OS. We have integrated Twitter into many of the built-in apps.

10:30 Newsstand makes it easier to read things on iPad. You can now have subscriptions. Things like the New Yorker, Allure, New York Times.

10:31 Camera: We know how popular the camera is on the iPhone. You can quickly get to the camera. New home button is camera button. You can get directly to it. You don’t have to type a password.

You can put finger down on a location and it will set auto exposure and auto focus to that spot. You can edit your photos on your device as well as remove red eye.

10:35 Forstall summarizes a few other features, such as tabbed browsing in the iPad and Mail improvements. Most of these were announced earlier.

iOS 5 will be available Oct. 12 — next week!

10:36 Eddie Cue, a senior vice president of internet software and services, takes the stage.

Say I take a photo. iCloud saves it to cloud and automatically pushes it to all of our devices. iCloud is free. iTunes is in the cloud.

I can see a list of all the albums and songs I just purchased. With a tap of a button, I can view all at no additioanl cost. I can even watch them on my Apple TV.

10:38 Photostream. Photos look gorgeous on iPhone. You wish they were on all of your devices. I take photos with Photostream and they are available on iCloud. So now the photo I took on my iPhone is right thtere on iCloud. I can see it on my Mac or the apple tv.

10:40 Now I create a new document with pages on my iPad. The document is right there. I can open and start editing where I left off on any device. APIs are available to developers, as free update on iOS. They are availalble on Oct. 12.

iCloud also does a daily backup of iOS devices.

10:41 What if you could find your family and friends? Today we are launching a new app called Find My Friends. You can share location at Disneyland. You can easily see where your family is. I can even see if my son made it to school ok today.

You can share your location for a temporary time, like a few hours a day. Y can share location at the beach, and then location sharing stops at the end of the day. There are simple privacy controls, and parental restrictions so parents can prevent kids from turning off the feature. It’ll be free for iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion users.

10:43 Apple is providing 5 gigabytes for mail documents and backup. If you want more you can pay for an upgrade.

iTunes Match lets you store your songs in the cloud, and you don’t have to upload them — iTunes recognizes what you’ve got and matches it with stored files it already has on its servers. It will cost $25 per year.

10:45 iCloud ships Oct. 12. iTunes Match at end of October in US.

10:48 Phil Schiller takes the stage to talk about the iPod.

“We started the iPod simply because we loved music. We’re still making them.”

Last year they updated the iPod nano. “Customers love it.” New updates this year: multitouch display is now easier to navigate. You can swipe between screens with your finger.

Fitness is one of the most popular uses for the nano. A lot of people like to run. So we now let you track runs and walks. You go out, plug it into the PC and upload data to Nike+ web site.

They noticed some people like to wear Nanos as watches. “We have added some new clock faaces for people who like to wear it as a watch.”

You can have a Mickey Mouse face on the nano.

The iPod nano comes in 7 colors. $149 at 16gb and $129 for 8gb. It’s available today.

10:50 The iPod Touch is now our most popular iPod. It has now become the most popular portable game player as well. It will now run ios 5. iPod touch does all of the same things, like iMessage. It is not a phone. But with it, you can communicate with your friends who are also using iMessage. On Wi-Fi it is free and unlimited.

Game center lets you discover new friends. With iOS 5, it is a tremendous upgrade of iPod touch. It also has iCloud support. “Now wherever you are, this amazingly thin iPod lets you access all of your data, songs etc.:

It comes in both black and a brand-new white version too. It used to be $229 for 8gb. now $199. 32GB is $299. 64GB is $399.

The iPod shuffle is still $49.

10:55 Last year we introduced iPhone 4. It is a breakthrough phone. While competitors tried really hard to copy it, they haven’t succeeded. It is the thinnest. Also, the number 1 smartphone in the world. People have been wondering, how do you follow up?

Now: iPhone 4s.

Inside is a dual-core A5 processor. It’s a brand new chip, and has 7x faster graphics.

10:57 The president of Epic Games, Mike Capps, shows off a game: Infinity Blade 2.

You can use 2 swords now. Character comes to life. Everything feels more grounded and alive.

Eye-melting graphics, dozens of new enemies, hundreds of new weapons.
It’s only going to run like this on an iphone 4s. the game will be available Dec. 1.

10:59 Phil Schiller is back.

The A5 chip has 2x faster CPU. dual-core processor, dual core graphics.

The phone will have 8 hours of 3G talk time, 14 hours of 2G talk time, and can run for 40 hours listening to music.

It intelligently switches between two antennae for both transmit and receive. It works even on a call to make even better call quality. It’s also faster too. 2x faster downloads.

In iPhone 4 you could upload 5.8 megabits up and 7..2 down. Now that doubles to 14.4 mbps down.

11:03 This is an HSDPA phone, Schiller says. (That’s the communications standard that used to be known as 3.5G, and is now called 4G by most manufacturers — even though it’s slower than WiMax or LTE-based 4G networks.) “We will not get into the debate on 4G.

iPhone 4 was GSM or CDMA (two incompatible options for different types of cellular networks). The iPHone 4S is a world phone with both GSM and CDMA capabilities.

11:05 iPhone 4 is already the most popular camera on Flickr, beating out digital cameras for the number of images uploaded.

The new camera has an 8 megapixel sensor. 3264x 2448 pixels. 60% more than iPhone 4 camera sensor.

Now it has backside illumination CMOS sensor (like the iPhone 4). It can gather 73 percent more light per pixel than the iPhone 4 and it’s 33 percent faster.

The camera has a hybrid IR filter, and better color accuracy.

We have a five element lens, with 5 Apple-designed custom lenses, compared to 4 lenses in iPhone 4. It has 30 percent more sharpness, and an f/2.4 aperture, giving it better low light performance as a result.

We use the A5 chip for image signal processing for advanced face detection. “It can tell if there are 10 people in a photo and does amazing.”

11:07 Droid Bionic takes 3.7 seconds to take a picture. iPhone 4s is 1.1 seconds. A second picture is 0.5 seconds on the iPhone 4S, while Droid is 1.6 more seconds.

11:10 Video recording. “It takes stunning HD video.” For the first time now it is 1080p resolution HD video recording.

We use the A5 to do real-time video image stabilization. It removes shakiness. We do temporal noise reduction for low light.

11:11 AirPlay is one of the best-kept secrets of iPhone 4. You stream photos to a TV set or play videos from an iPhone on your tv. You can now do AirPlay mirroring. So you can see a game up on the TV set as you are playing it. You can plug in an HDMI cable too.

And that’s it for the iPhone 4S.

11:12. Now we’re going to hear about iPhone 4S voice control, aka Siri.

“For decades we have dreamed we would talk to technology and it would do things for us,” says Schiller. “But it never comes true.
It is such a letdown. What we really want to do is just talk to our device.”

11:15 Siri is your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.

To use it, you just hold down the home button and talk. For instance, you can ask it “What is the weather today?” Forstall gives a demo of how it works.

It’s integrated with the iPhone’s basic apps, so you can ask it “What time is it in Paris?” and it will tell you, or tell it “Wake me tomorrow at 6 a.m.” and it will set an alarm. You can also ask it for Nasdaq prices on a particular stock and it will give you the latest.

11:17 They’ve partnered with Yelp. So you can ask it to find all the Greek restaurants in a particular city.

It can read map directions to you.

11:20 When you get a text message, you can ask Siri to read it to you, just by saying “Read my message.” It reads it back to you. You can reply. But first you can check your calendar with Siri. You can then reply to a lunch invitation, for example. Siri is following along on the conversation, so it “knows” who you’re talking to.

You can then schedule lunch and it will show up on your calendar. You confirm it.

“This blows me away,” Forstall says.

11:22 The reminder app is integrated with Siri. You can say “Remind me to call my wife when I leave work.” You confirm it and it has a geofence around work. when you leave, it prompts you to call your wife.

Forstall: “It knows who your wife is.”

11:24 You can search Wikipedia for Neil Armstrong and it takes you right to Safari, to the article in Wikipedia. We have also partnered with Wolfram Alpha, which has a dictionary built in.

You can say “define mitosis.” It answers. “How many dollars is 45 euros?” Siri answers, “Let me check on that. This might answer your question.” It gives you $59.59.

“How many days until Christmas?” It answers 82 days.

“We built a guide right into the user interface.” It tells you all things you can do. You can voice dial, control music, set up a meeting, send a message, ask for a reminder, get directions, send an email.

11:25 If you ask it “Who are you?” it says, “I am a humble personal assistant.”

11:26 Schiller returns to the stage.

Siri works on Wi-Fi and 3G. It works with English, German and French, and they will add more languages and services over time. It is  beta at the start.

It will be available for the iPhone 4S only.

Apple’s showing a promotional video now.

11:34 iPhone pricing.

They’ll still be selling the iPhone 3GS at $49 and the iPhone 4 is now $99 for the 8GB model (with 2-year contracts, of course).

The iPhone 3GS is now free at 8GB, with a 2-year contract.

For the iPhone 4S: $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB, and $399 for 64GB models, with 2-year contract.

Preorders start this Friday, Oct. 7 and the phones will start shipping Oct. 14.

It will be available in 7 countries on Oct. 14: The U.S., Canada, France, Australia, U.K., France, Germany, Japan.
They’ll be using KDDI for the first time in Japan.

On Oct. 28 they’ll launch in 22 more countries, and by December they plan to be in 70 countries on 100 carriers.

11:38 Tim Cook comes back onstage to wrap up the event.

“When you look at each of these, they are great and  fantastic and industry-leading in and of themselves,” Cook said. “What sets them apart is how they are engineered to work together well. Only Apple can make amazing hardware, software and services and bring them together in an integrated experience. I am so incredibly proud of this company and its employees.”

And that’s it! Sorry, no iPhone 5 today, Apple fans!

This story is developing, refresh for updates.

Photos: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat. Some photos by Christina Bonnington and Brian X. Chen/Wired.com.