Let’s stop talking about the iPhone3G for a minute. Did you get a good look at Steve Jobs at the WWDC Keynote yesterday?

See the pic above: on the left, Steve at the keynote for iPhone 1.0 over a year ago, and on the right, at yesterday’s presentation. They say black mock turtlenecks really are slimming, but this is a bit much.

Ever since he came onstage yesterday at Moscone West, the web has been as much abuzz about Mr. Jobs and how frighteningly thin he’s become since we last saw him as much as the new iPhone itself. Google his name today and you’ll likely get news items like this at the top of the search list.

Jobs came out in 2003 to disclose his ongoing battle with a rare form of pancreatic cancer, which has since been successfully treated, or so he says. It’s hard to tell because, as we all know, Apple and Steve Jobs seem pretty good at keeping secrets.

If something’s amiss with The Steve, it’ll have tremendous impact on the future and direction of Apple, because face it—the man is Apple. More than any other company in recent history, multi-billion dollar Apple Inc. is the one whose fate is most intimately intertwined with the vision of its leader. Let’s hope that he’s just been spending too much time with his Wii Fit balance board thing.

Seriously though, let’s pray that things are all right for Steve Jobs.

Remember the pic of the box from the previous post? Apparently they succumbed and opened it. Less than 24 hours to go before the deadline and the keynote announcement, and they go and open it—and a website has the pics.

Sheesh. Some heads are gonna roll.

We can’t vouch for the pictures’ veracity; for all we know it may be another iPhone 2.0 hoax, but it seems real enough. Does it look thinner and wider to you? I’m intrigued by what seems to be a front-facing camera on the upper right corner. And the color! But we’ll all know if this is real later, won’t we?

Link to the site here.

Don’t we all love it when a shipper delivers a box to our doorstep?

Well, some folk down under are beside themselves this weekend.

Australian Mac Community forum site MacTalk reports that they received a sealed box from Apple yesterday that is marked “Subject to terms of NDA. Do not open until Tuesday June 10th 2008.”

They suspect it’s a promotional iPhone 2.0 unit for display until supply actually becomes available. Other resellers across Australia (and presumably around the world) have received similar boxes under the same Non-Disclosure Agreement. This means the phone might not actually be available for purchase immediately after the WWDC announcement as initially hoped, at least outside the United States. Sigh.

(If it were me with the box, I don’t know if I’d have the restraint. Especially because I didn’t sign no stinkin’ NDA.)

Patience, patience. As they say in my country: dalawang tulog na lang.

The new version of Mac OS X, 10.6, will be known as Snow Leopard. Snow. Leopard.

Or at least that’s what Ars Technica seems convinced of. They also say it’ll be launched at Macworld 2009 in January, and will be Intel-only.

Previous speculation says that 10.6 seeds’ll be released to developers next week at the WWDC, in preparation for its release next year. As for changes, apparently it’ll be basically the same, except that it’ll be faster and more stable, rather than have anything really new or innovative. The report says this is because speed and stability are bigger concerns now that Apple’s firmly entrenched in smaller and more mobile gadgets that need these elements more than anything.

PowerPC users are expectedly crushed by this news. Our sympathies.

[UPDATE: Typo! As a bunch of readers immediately noted, I wrote the version wrong (10.5.6). Dunno what got into me - maybe because i was sneaking in this post as I was in a sales meeting. Heh. Serves me right! Fixed it already. Thanks, eagle-eyed MacADoodlers! You know who you are!]

Non-Filipino readers might find this post’s title odd, but it’s just Taglish for “I’m mobile”, which for this blogger is a clumsy play on the rumored new name for Apple’s .Mac service (and for the purposes of this blog will be referred to as DotMac, to retain the sanity of my word processor’s autocorrect feature.) It’s also a play on the current and more-than-annoying marketing campaign of local telecom provider Smart Communications called “Me na Me” presently irritating us silly here in Manila for their Smart Buddy service.

Ok. So there I go ruining the whole structure of the post just so I could have my silly title. Let’s just have it out then: According to rumors, Apple seems to be set on renaming their DotMac service, that US$99 one-year thing where you get a paltry amount of online storage and a snotty email address that ends in “mac.com” (and some other stuff), to Mobile Me. Ugh.

Dunno about you, but the fact that you can get everything DotMac is offering for free elsewhere online seems to me a testament to the lengths fanboys will go to for their mothership. (Full disclosure: I used to be suckered into this thing too, and had a DotMac account for three years or so until I wised up and saved my money instead to buy more useful things like food. And beer.) But apparently it may be time to come back to the fold.

According to many archived reports, Apple trademarked the name Mobile Mac on Jan. 5, 2006, and while much was made of it at the time as Apple folk are wont to do, nothing happened and people forgot about it. Now though, people poking through the code of the recently released 10.5.3 update of Leopard have come across considerable evidence that Apple is finally going to use the two-year-old name, presumably after the relaunching announcement to be made at Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote on June 9.

A rose by any other name, blah blah. What’s more important is what new stuff it will offer for the hundred bucks (or however much they’ll be charging for it), and right now all we can do is make educated guesses. Obviously it will tie in with the new 3G iPhone and include stuff like push email, wireless syncing and things Blackberry fans have been enjoying for years. We’ll just have to add Mobile Me to our list of things to wait for during the keynote. If it had really useful features, I wouldn’t be averse to signing back up again and resurrecting my old DotMac address.

Which also means most of us renegade iPhone users will have to formally sign up with Globe Telecom when it finally releases the phone for my country (sometime in September, if rumors are to be believed). Obviously my non-3G first-gen kracked-and-jailbroken iPhone won’t do, so I’ll have to pony up for the new one. Life is hard. Ah, well.

(By the way, is it just me, or does Mobile Me really sound like an embarrasingly jejune name for an Apple service? It even sounds …Microsoftian, like something Gates and Ballmer might’ve thought up. Sheesh.)

[Box art mock-up via TUAW]