Well, to be honest, Apple more or less told us what the major announcements are going to be for this years Worldwide Developer Conference keynote; which Steve Jobs will be giving next Monday at 10 AM PST. This morning they put out a press release stating that they keynote will unveil OSX Lion, iOS5 and Apple’s new cloud service iCloud. I think these will just be the main announcements and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Steve Jobs has one of his typical “One More Things” at the end of the presentation. I think that the surprise announcement will be a new iPhone which rumor has it will be a minor upgrade called the iPhone 4s. So I will go through each of the announcements Apple confirmed and then my thoughts of what the iPhone 4S will be.

Mac OSX Lion- I think that Steve Jobs will give a review of the new features of Lion that were shown off at the Back To The Mac event in October and then demonstrate some additional features. I fully expect a release date and pricing to be announced during the keynote; I expect it to be an affordable upgrade like Snow Leopard was perhaps even for the  same $29. I also think that they distribute the upgrade through the Mac App store at the very least as an option if not the only method of upgrading since, that is how they have already been delivering the developer previews. As for time frame, I think that Lion will be available within the next month if not the day of the keynote which is the most likely release date.

iOS 5- The iOS 5 announcement will be a demonstration of the new features which are rumored to be a major upgrade to the iOS. The rumored features are: new notifications, widgets, much deeper cloud integration, gesture support and Near field communication (which allows users to use their phone to make payments). I think this could go one of two ways: either it is the typical WWDC where they announce new hardware and software and the software is  released the day of the keynote with the new hardware following a week or two later. Or, he other possibility is that this will be just a preview of the software and will be released in the Fall with a new iPhone at that time. I’m thinking it will be the standard WWDC with new hardware and software announcements but, there have been rumors of a Fall iPhone release because the Verizon iPhone 4 was released just a few months ago.

iCloud- I wrote about  what I think Apple will do for their cloud service in my last article. With a name like iCloud I think that it will be both a data service like MobileMe and hopefully over-the-air iOS sync as well as a music streaming service. If it was something like iTunes live, I might think it was just a music service but I think we will be getting both. The service will most likely have a free version as well as a premium version which will at least have a private beta release on the day of or very soon after the keynote.

iPhone 4S- If there is an iPhone announcement next week, I don’t think that it will be a major update but, instead a minor release like the iPhone 3Gs. I think the 4S will have the faster duel-core A5 processor like the iPad 2, maybe a better camera, and  maybe the addition of near field communication technology. There won’t be a new case design or any major new features, just a slight modification.

These are the four major predictions that I have for WWDC and think they are the most likely. Other things that we might see are: the release of Final Cut Pro X, updates to the rest of the Final Cut Suite, and possibly other software upgrades. However, many of these announcements are much less likely. Check back to Gdovin.net after the keynote for review of what did happened.