Shortly after the WWDC keynote ended Monday morning, an estimated one to two million members of Apple’s .Mac service received an email message from the mother ship, which began: “Today Apple announced a new Internet service called MobileMe — taking the best of .Mac and adding a host of new features. As a current .Mac member, your account will be automatically upgraded to MobileMe in July.”

Now we all understand that .Mac has been an under achiever for an awfully long time. Even Steve Jobs has admitted as much. At $99, storage space of 10GB isn’t a big deal, and there are those erratic and never-ending service outages to contend with.

Of course, Microsoft has notorious for rebranding a product that doesn’t succeed as well as expected, so you have to wonder whether Apple had any of this in mind in creating MobileMe. But that’s not the entire story.

For most of you, the most significant new feature in MobileMe is “push.” As Apple says in that email: “Push email. Push contacts. Push calendar. In addition to Mac-to-Mac syncing, MobileMe now keeps your iPhone or iPod touch in sync too. MobileMe pushes new contacts, calendar items, and bookmarks to your Mac or PC, and over the air to your iPhone or iPod touch. For example, if you add a calendar event on the web, the change will automatically be pushed to your Mac and iPhone. New email will be pushed to your iPhone in seconds, eliminating the need to check for messages manually.”

Just to clarify the market-speak, yes, sync capabilities are available from PC-to-PC and between Macs and PCs.

Indeed “push” technology is a technique that immediately moves your data back and forth without having to wait for a fixed time for receiving email, or synchronizing the rest of your stuff.

That’s what Microsoft offers with its Exchange email service, and simplifying and refining a usually arcane technology for regular people is a large part of Apple’s magic touch. So you can well understand how MobileMe is being promoted as “Exchange for the rest of us.”

However, MobileMe is not groupware. It’s primarily a souped-up .Mac designed for for empowering individuals. And thus the interfaces of all the components that formerly constituted .Mac will be refined, made more elegant, and also easier to operate on an iPhone.

The removal of the “Mac” label is also meant to make the service more palatable to Windows users, and it will be designed for both, same as iTunes, Safari and all the rest of Apple’s two-platform products. It will work with the current versions of the major browsers, ranging from Safari to Firefox and even Internet Explorer.

So what’s going to happen to your existing stuff over at .Mac? Well, other than getting a new set of clothes, in keeping with Apple’s promise, you’ll lose none of your data. Your account will be automatically converted, and your storage allotment will increase accordingly.

In addition to those new or modified features, and interface refinements, the standard storage package will double to 20GB, and if you opted for an extra-cost storage upgrade, that, too, will double.

As to your email address, you’ll get two. One will be your existing mac.com address, and the other will be a me.com account, with the same username. Pick your poison. But at least you won’t have to send any change of addresses notices anytime soon. I do suspect, however, that after a few years of this, Apple might indeed phase out the various .Mac designations for the sake of simplicity, less confusion, or whatever.

So what’s the cost of all this joy? It’s still $99, folks, although discounts can be had from time to time, particularly when you buy a new Mac, or you do a little price shopping online.

I suppose MobileMe isn’t a bad name among the potential choices, though it sounds a little juvenile to me. I can imagine grade school students embracing that title without hesitation, but it seems a little much if you’re over 13. The same goes for that me.com email address, which is the main reason while I plan to hold onto my mac.com email address for as long as Apple will allow.

The real concern, however, is one that was never discussed during the keynote, and that’s too bad. While I realize there may be some network glitches during the initial transition process, the question remains just how Apple plans to handle the ongoing service issues that periodically impacted .Mac over the years. In addition to the push messaging, they might have said something about working on the servers to improve reliability and performance.

But they didn’t, and I remain highly skeptical that anything will change, other than that there will be more to break.

At the same time, I’ve grown accustomed to my mac.com email address, and I do use the iDisk storage space on a rare occasion. So I’ll probably keep my membership active for a while longer.

Apple, however, is going to have to work a lot harder to convert the skeptics. Let’s see how well they fare with the reinvention of .Mac.

All right, folks, you can save up your spare cash (after filling the gas tank) for your new 3G-enabled iPhone. But the rest of the WWDC keynote more or less what you might have expected — and in some cases, less if you crave instant gratification.

Ahead of the Steve Jobs keynote, it was interesting to note that Wall Street revealed early skepticism, witness the dip in Apple’s stock price. Does this mean that they know something we don’t? Or are they taking the sum total of the expected announcements as not terribly significant in the scheme of things? Or maybe it’s just the staggered state of the U.S. economy that’s bringing the overall market down — and I’m willing to accept the latter theory for now.

In doing his introduction to the keynote, which began somewhat late this morning, Steve Jobs came out and confirmed the rumors that the next version of Mac OS X would be introduced, and that it would be known as Snow Leopard. But the first part, as widely expected, is all iPhone.

Since the discussion was primarily focused on the developer community, the iPhone SDK was profiled by programming chief Scott Forstall, who emphasized the enterprise features, such as push email, push contacts, and global wipe. These are some of the critical features businesses require on their smartphones.

You’ll also see expanded support for Microsoft Office, plus support for Apple’s iWork. Additionally, there will be a full-featured scientific calculator. Take that, Texas Instruments!

Among the new products that will be available at the Apps Store: Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, and even an eBay application to allow you to handle your auctions on your iPhone. For bloggers, there will be a version of TypePad, but, sadly, nothing about WordPress, the tool we use. And if you’re a news junkie, AP’s Mobile News Network may be your cup of tea.

When it comes to instant messaging, Apple’s solution, in order to let you know your buddy wants to reach you, is a push notification system that will go into beta this month. It’ll be ready in September, and will, above all else, preserve the iPhone’s battery life.

While all this is going on, Apple’s online store is offline with its typical “updating” message, and it’ll be back online after the keynote concludes. Meantime, the only fly in the ointment is the fact that the iPhone’s Apps Store did not launch today, a clue that was brought home by the constant use of the phrase, “when the Apps Store launches.” In fact, it’ll be available in early July, a little later than originally promised. However, iPod touch owners will only pay $9.95 for the update, due to the way Apple calculates income from the product. It’s free for iPhone owners.

The next development was nothing if predictable. MobileMe is a Web service that Apple VP Phil Schiller characterizes as a sort of Exchange for the rest of us, a consumer-level service with push email, calendars, and contacts, and it’s also compatible with Windows and thus works on both Apple Mail and Outlook, in addition to your iPhone.

In case you’re wondering, MobileMe indeed replaces .Mac, but will be priced at the same $99 per year. However, storage space doubles to 20GB, and a free trial will be available when the iPhone 2.0 software ships next month. If you’re a .Mac subscriber, you’ll be automatically upgraded to the revised service in the coming weeks.

The main event, however, was iPhone 3G. Apple sold some six million of the previous model before it ran out of stock a few weeks ago. In addition to the speedier online access, rated at 2.8 times faster than the older EDGE network, some of the published rumors were confirmed. The rear of iPhone 3G is black plastic with thinner edges than the original version. According to Jobs, audio quality is improved “dramatically,” and the headphone jack, a source of many complaints, is flush.

Among the other features, the new device also features GPS. Talk time is a mixed bag. It’s 10 hours for 2G (up from eight hours with the current model), but only five hours for 3G, and apparently you’ll be able to make the inevitable selection between the two network standards under Settings. 

Best of all, the 8GB version of iPhone 3G is a mere $199, compared to the $399 I paid for my first-generation model. The 16GB version, available in black and white, will be $299. Sorry, folks, no refunds for your current iPhones. Even better for the millions who unlocked theirs, the iPhone 3G will be available, over the next several months, in 70 countries. The initial roll-out will be in 22 countries, including North America, where it’ll go on sale on July 11.

And Snow Leopard? Sorry folks, not a part of the keynote. In a brief statement after the main event, Apple promised that the next version of Mac OS X would arrive in about a year, and be confined mostly to performance optimizations, particularly for multi-core Macs.

The real losers in the prediction game were those who expected new Macs, such as something to be called the Mac Fusion, which, in the mockup pictures, looked like a wider Mac mini. Let the comments begin.

When Apple acquired NeXT in the last century, the original release of the long-promised industrial-strength operating system seemed to take forever. First, there was Rhapsody, and when developers balked at having to recode all or most of their products, Apple went back to the drawing boards and begat Carbon and Aqua. The former made it much easier to port applications, and the latter delivered an enhanced Mac interface.

But it took until September 2000 to release a public beta, and the supposed final version of Mac OS X didn’t arrive until March of 2001. Even then, it was far from feature complete. You couldn’t even burn CDs. How soon we forget.

For a while, it seemed that new Mac OS X reference releases came at a breakneck speed. Only the first upgrade, 10.1, was free. For the rest, you had to shell out $129, unless you happened to buy a new Mac or, perhaps, an upgrade kit of the previous version within a few weeks of the new one’s shipping date.

Between Tiger and Leopard, however, 30 months passed, and it seemed as if Apple had decided to take its time building new system upgrades. To be sure, Tiger had a flaky beginning and some suggest that only with 10.4.11 did it come into its own. Even then, there are still a few out there who will staunchly maintain that Tiger was still plagued with serious bugs.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

Ahead of next week’s expected release if the iPhone 2.0 software and a new version of this hot-selling smartphone, I have to tell you I’m reasonably happy with mine.

When I got one, I didn’t make the decision lightly. In fact, I waited until February, the day before the 16GB version was released, actually, before I took the plunge. However, I did get upfront exposure weeks earlier, when Apple relented and sent me one for review.

I was highly skeptical on the matter, as my primary use of a wireless carrier was to make phone calls. My previous phones, including the Motorola RAZR I got with my AT&T account, worked reasonably well considering the state of the art. So why should I require the ability to surf the Internet and check and write email? It’s not as if I was an inveterate iPod junkie, so I put that capability at the very bottom of the list.

So maybe Apple sent me that iPhone with the full expectation that, once I had used it for a few weeks, when I returned it at the end of the review period, I would immediately go out and buy my one. They were right.

My favorite feature is the ability to keep track of my email. My wife has long suffered my regular calls when I’m on the road about whether I got any important messages. It’s not that I could do anything about it until I had access to a computer, but I didn’t want to be kept out of the loop.

Now she is happy, and so am I. In fact, I keep my iPhone on a night table next to our bed, so, if I happen to wake up early, I can check for important messages, and sometimes I actually receive them. I can also keep tabs on the Web sites to make sure there are no problems that need fast fixing.

Now as a telephone, the iPhone is good, about on a par with most of the quality wireless handsets out there. I don’t perceive any particular advantage, for example, among such models as the iPhone, Motorola RAZR or the various LG units I’ve had. It’s really hard to find a phone that sounds bad; you just get the generally clear audio, occasionally clouded by digital haze, but that’s the state of the art for the wireless industry I fear.

However, there are some areas where I would like to see improvements. Call me petty, for example, but I’d really like a way to presort my email accounts in the same sequence as they are setup on Apple Mail. Unless I actually set up the accounts manually, they go into a random sequence on the iPhone and remain stuck that way. They don’t even follow the order shown in the Info panel in iTunes.

Now maybe there is a secret way to accomplish this minor chore, but I couldn’t find anything about it over at Apple’s support site. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough. I also contacted some of the iPhone gurus out there — people who have written articles and books on the subject — and they didn’t have an answer either. Well, it may not matter for one or two accounts, I use eight on a fairly regular basis, and if I had more, I’d have to continually scroll to get to the one I wanted, if it was in the wrong sequence.

The other issues that annoy me are speed and stability. Even on my home Wi-Fi connection to Cox’s 15 megabit broadband network, Safari can still be a slow renderer even on a site that ought to display with reasonable rapidity. At times, it stalls out, and you’re thrust back to the Home screen. That’s the equivalent of an application suddenly quitting under Mac OS X. At times, I’m even forced to restart.

Another issue of less importance occurs if I happen to want to make a general configuration change on my email accounts. I’ve duplicated this issue several times, so it wasn’t just one of those things. Once I get past four or five accounts, even after making a minor change, such as switching access port numbers for connecting to my mail server, the iPhone freezes. Holding the Home button for a short period will get me out of that situation.

Such issues smack of software bugs of one sort or another. While I can see such irritants as part and parcel of a version 1.0 product, as of 1.1.4, I would have thought that Apple might have cured them. Or maybe it’s too busy working on version 2.0, which will address the little things, I trust, rather than just deliver the big picture.

The other issue is related to the iPhone’s Bluetooth interface with an auto. Now I can’t say if the problem is related to the car or the phone. The dealer’s service foreman assures me that the vehicle’s firmware is current, but sometimes the connection seems to succeed only partly. The audio cuts in and out rapidly. Switching to the iPhone’s own headset will cure it, so it seems to be an artifact of the connection. Sometimes just turning off the ignition and starting up again fixes it. Sometimes I have to actually reboot the iPhone, so maybe it’s the combo that creates this anomaly. And, yes, the car is certified as compatible with the iPhone, according to the manufacturer’s documentation.

On the whole, as I said, I’m hugely satisfied with the iPhone. There are certainly features I’d like to add, such as the ability to cut, copy and paste, and perhaps the results of a reconciliation between Apple and Adobe to deliver true Flash support. I’m also certain there will be a fair number of whiz-bang features added to give the new software and 3G iPhone a great sendoff.

But I do hope Apple doesn’t ignore the little things when it concentrates on the big picture.