I"m on the second floor of Moscone West after the WWDC keynote (look for the bald guy with the JavaOne backpack and the ama-gi hoodie. The mood's maybe a little odd because of the lack of any earth-shaking announcements from the keynote... we seem to have reached the point where the hype (and leaks) leading up to a Steve Jobs keynote now exceeds the ability of anything in the keynote to shock and delight. The biggest announcements -- the 3G iPhone, its price cut, its broad international availability, and .Mac becoming Mobile Me -- were either rumored, anticipated, or inevitable before the event began.

It's a shame, actually, because getting to $199 with a better iPhone, not a scaled-down "iPhone nano" is quite an accomplishment. Anyone doubt now that Apple will sell 10 million iPhones this year?

Opening up the Void Book, it's worth considering what wasn't announced:

• The date that the App Store will open -- is it when iPhone 2.0 software ships? A lot of the demos made reference to their apps being available "when the app store opens", but nobody committed to a date.
• Further details on getting an app on the store -- to what degree will Apple vet submissions?
• Anything about the next version of Mac OS X, other than its name "Snow Leopard" and the fact that it will be discussed at this afternoon's session (which, like everything at WWDC other than the keynote, is NDA)
• Any further Cocoa Touch devices. It makes sense that Apple is focusing on establishing the iPhone, but it's got to be tempting to get this great consumer/mobile OS into other devices. A while back, I wrote on my personal blog about the potential merits of a Cocoa Touch based Apple TV, using a Wiimote-like pointing device.
• The future of the iPod line. Of the three stool legs in Steve's slide, "Music" seemed an odd duck, being a mix of music and iPods, one of which is a service and the other is a hardware line that iPhone OS devices are already encroaching on, in the form of the iPod Touch. It's also the only one that's substantially closed to third-party development.
• Absent among the 70 countries to get the iPhone: Russia and China

The parade of third-party iPhone apps was maybe two demos too long, but the scope and quality on display was quite impressive, particularly the rendering abilities of the second medical app, and the polish of the music-making application.

I'm suddenly a little worried about gaming, for which the iPhone has a very promising future. Apple has been working with classy and beloved developers for iPod games -- Bandai Namco for the Pac-Man series, Sega for "Sonic the Hedgehog" (I'm stuck on Labyrinth Zone Act 3 after 80-some games), and Harmonix for the clever "Phase" -- so I was a little worried that the new games presented today were from much smaller companies with less-well-known titles. There's not anything wrong with, say, the Pangea games, but they're not system-sellers. Does anybody really need another Kart racer, one without Mario? The other thing I'm noticing here is that much was made of using the accelerometer as the primary means of input. If the idea gets out that that's the only practical UI for games, it's not going to help the platform. Maybe a game that's intrinsically tied to buttons -- fighters come to mind -- isn't going to fly, but what about menu-driven games like RPG's, strategy games, and puzzles? iPhone might move a few more units in Japan if buyers knew that it would let them take a beloved franchise like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest mobile.

Dang... 1:15 and the line's already forming. Guess I'd better queue up for the Mac OS X State of the Union...

Update, 6:00 PM: Come to think of it, if the 3G iPhone isn't coming until July, then what was in those 188 shipping containers, or the Australian "do not open" Apple boxes?