I was happy to hear this morning that the film has won the Best Animated Short Film award at the 2010 Academy Awards!

I was extremely excited about the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2008, and so headed off to macrumors.com for a live feed of Steve Jobs’ keynote.

After a rather slow build-up, the almost inevitable announcement from Jobs that the 3G iteration of the iPhone was made. And so, there must follow an end to the enormous amount of speculation in blogs and forums about the features of the second generation iPhone.

As I saw the updates on macrumors.com, I was pleased, but not particularly surprised to see the following features:

• 3G speed. No great revelation – many of us Europeans saw the lack of 3G in first geneation as a serious drawback;
• GPS. Once again, this is now becoming standard on high-end mobiles such as Nokia’s N95, so there was almost an expectation that this would feature.
• App Store. I welcome the addition of an app store – extending the functionality of the device is most useful, and it’s an additional revenue stream for apple.
• ‘iPhone in Enterprise’. Push e-mail and integration with Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync is a big plus for business users. Should Blackberry be worried?
• Now available in white. No doubt there will be a pink version soon. I’ll stick with black, thanks.

The App Store interests me – particularly the iPhone version of Super Monkey Ball. The built-in accelerometer suits the game very well, and I look forward to playing some games on a mobile platform.

What struck me more than anything, and something that was lacking from much speculation was the price. Although it’s somewhat irksome, considering I paid over £200 for my phone, I was shocked at the price of the new iPhone. $199 for the 8Gb version, and $299 for the 16Gb version is quite amazing, but let’s wait a little to see what carriers charge for a contract, and how long the minimum contract term will be.

Shortly after the announcement, Apple’s UK site was updated with the 3G iPhone details, and UK iPhone carrier O₂’s followed with a ‘come back tomorrow’ teaser.

Well, I reckon that the 8Gb price will be £129 in the UK with an 18 month or perhaps even a 24 month contract. How much an upgrade will cost is anybody’s guess, but hopefully, as the O₂ website states, all will be revealed tomorrow.

So, much of the speculation was correct, and although the price point is certainly attactive, I’m surprised about the camera remaining at its current specs of 2 megapixel. Whilst I think that this is ok, it doesn’t deal with any kind of movement at all well, and the delay is not acceptable. Perhaps a flash would have been too large a drain on battery life; increasing the megapixels, but not including a flash would have been an even stranger position than doing nothing at all. Perhaps we’ll see that in the third generation, along with the pink colour scheme.

The corporation’s site has moved in tandem with the evolution of the web, and the nostalgia of it’s development over this time is surpassed by the excitement of where it will go in future.   It may lack some web standards compliance, but to fault it on this area would be missing the point – it is the quality of the writing, alongside the diversity and amount of articles, that makes it the choice of millions of people around the world.

Here’s to another 10 years BBC.