MacWorld 2009 Keynote Coverage: DRM-Free Music, Keynote Remote & iPhotos Slideshow

Without a surprise, no Steve Jobs for this year’s MacWorld as he made a public letter to clarify the exact reason why he skips this event. Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, took over the stage and delivered Apple’s final keynote at MacWorld.

So, any big news related to iPhone? The short answer is No. Don’t expect Apple will debut iPhone Nano or a new tablet (an enlarged version of iPod Touch). As mentioned by Phil early during the presentation, this keynote would focus on Mac side. The updates on iPhone are apparently minor but they are still pretty awesome.

iTunes Access via 3G/EDGE and DRM-free Music

First, the iTunes store is no longer just available for WiFi access. You can now access it via 3G / EDGE network. That’s pretty great. By using iPhone and the cellular data network, you can now directly purchase and download songs from iTunes store anytime and anywhere. The service is already effective in some countries.

Phil also announced another big news related to iTunes music store. Starting today, all songs offered in iTunes store are DRM-free and with higher quality (256-Kbps AAC encoding). So, you can now play the iTunes music on iPhone, iPod, computer and even other digital music players. For songs previously purchased, Apple offers an option for you to upgrade to DRM-free. But, you need pay the 30¢ per song upgrade price.

The price model of iTunes music also changes a bit. Instead of a single tier of pricing, for which every song is sold at $0.99, Phil announced a new 3-tier pricing model: $0.79 (older songs), $0.99 and $1.29, which is based on the charge from music labels.

iWork 09: Keynote Remote for iPhone

In the keynote, Phil announced the debut of iWork 09. If you haven’t heard of iWork, you can consider it as a Mac version of Microsoft Office, which is completely designed & developed from ground-up by Apple. What comes with iWork 09 is a bunch of new fancy features. And one is particularly related to iPhone. You can now use iPhone to control the Keynote presentation (a counterpart of MS Powerpoint) remotely via WiFi. With the Keynote remote application, you can see both the current and next slide on iPhone. To go to the next slide, just swipe to advance.

The Keynote remote application is now available on App Store. Unlike Apple’s awesome iTunes remote application, this application is not available for free but sold at $0.99.

iPhotos 09: Themed SlideShows on iPhone

iPhotos 09, which is part of the iLife suite, is updated with face detection (known as Faces) and location-aware (known as Places) feature. For Places, if you take pictures using iPhone with location enabled, iPhotos will automatically locate the photos when you load the photo from iPhone to your Mac. You can then arrange and explore all your photos by location.

Another new update comes with iPhotos 09 is Themed Slideshows. iPhotos lets you create themed slideshows from your photo collection easily. By default, iPhotos bundles six beautiful themes including Classic, Shatter, Snapshots, Scrapbook, Ken Burns, and Sliding Panels. The slide show is exportable as movie to different devices including iPod Touch, iPhone and Apple TV. So, you can show off the terrific slide show to your friends anytime and anywhere.

That’s all

That’s all for the iPhone update of Apple’s keynote. No big announcement for iPhone (even for Mac). No update on the next version of firmware. You probably are disappointed. As an iPhone/Mac fan and Apple stock holder, I’m quite a bit disappointed. But frankly, we can’t always expect revolutionary product announcement at every Mac events. We all put extremely high expectation on the extra-ordinary company. Let’s hope Apple will announce something great in the next event.

However, one thing I definitely miss is Steve’s presentation. No one can replace Steve Jobs. Phil Schiller already did a great job but Steve is awesome. To learn more about the keynote presentation, Apple has published the complete version at its website. You can click on this link to access the streaming video.

[Image source via Apple]

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MacWorld 2009 Keynote Coverage: DRM-Free Music, Keynote Remote & iPhotos Slideshow