WWDC 2011: Steve Jobs to Bring Forth Apple iOS 5, MAC OS X Lion and iCloud

Come June 6 2011, San Francisco's Moscone Center is going to go wild as Apple's head honcho, Steve Jobs will be back in action at WWDC to usher in all the new goodies from Apple. A couple of days ago, Siddhartha Banerjee, had predicted that the WWDC is going to be a software affair this year and he was quite right. It's a frequent practice for Apple to release a pre-event official press release of products or services that would be announced, but they have confirmed that iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud would all be taking centre stage at WWDC 2011.

This WWDC, its software all the way

Apple will be releasing the eighth iteration of the Mac OS X Lion, along with Apple’s cloud services called (Surprise… Surprise) iCloud. One could think of Apple's iCloud offering to be a serious upgrade from their paid-for MobileMe service that was started about three years ago. Of course, it was meant to be only as a back-up service for content like images, events emails etc. but was not designed for email. iCloud, with backing from an all new data center opened by Apple, will allow users to access data like music from Apple's online space freeing up disk space on thier devices. This is quite similar to Amazon's Cloud player that was also announced earlier this year. Looks like the cloud services domain also has some heavy competition in progress.

The third item on the WWDC agenda is iOS 5 for Apple's beloved mobile devices - iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. You'll have to curb your enthusiasm a little until June 6, which is just around the corner, unlike the previous time when iOS 4.3 launched two days earlier than scheduled, this one looks too major a software release to be having the same fate. With front-man Steve Jobs running the keynote again this year, in spite of his health issues, loyal Apple fans will undoubtedly be gathering in droves outside the center. Jobs wasn't really expected to personally announce the iPad 2 either when it was launched on March 2nd, but he managed to make it there, too.

This might also be the first time that Apple's annual WWDC event will not have a product i.e. hardware launch. Then again Apple has neither confirmed nor denied the launch of the iPhone 4S/5. Could Steve be keeping this one big announcement under wraps while teasing us with just software updates and launches? One never knows with Apple. We've got our fingers crossed.

Stay tuned to tech2 for live coverage of WWDC 2011 on June 6 2011.