Apple CEO Steve Jobs used his two-hour opening keynote at the Californian vendor’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) today to unveil the next-generation iPhone and its new operating system. During the event, Jobs went into overdrive highlighting some of the features – claiming it to be “the biggest leap since the original iPhone” – in an apparent attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that images of the new device leaked onto the blogosphere a few weeks ago. “Believe me, you ain’t seen it,” swiped Jobs. “You gotta see this thing in person. One of the most beautiful designs we’ve ever seen.” Elsewhere, Apple’s head man revealed a number of high-profile statistics surrounding the company’s mobile product success and revenue.

‘iPhone 4’ is claimed to be the thinnest smartphone ever (9.3 millimeters) and goes on sale in the US, France, Germany, Japan and the UK on June 24 (with pre-orders available June 15). Available in either black or white, it will retail in the US for US$199 for the 16GB model and US$299 for the 32GB model. Also on June 24, Apple will reduce the price of its existing 3GS 8GB model to US$99. A further 18 countries will receive the iPhone 4 by the end of July, with this total increased to 88 by the end of September, making it Apple’s fastest ever product rollout globally.

‘FaceTime’ video calling was arguably the biggest talking point during Jobs’ address. Making use of the new device’s front and rear cameras, the service aims to finally make the concept of video calling on mobile devices a success. “The idea of communicating this way is an old idea, but we’ve had to wait an awfully long time for it to become real,” noted Jobs, in a nod to previous failed efforts by 3G operators.  Interestingly, Apple’s service will only be available over WiFi this year at least: “We need to work a little bit with the cellular providers in the future,” admitted Jobs. The vendor is also planning on making the service an open industry standard, so that other device manufacturers can include it in their offerings.

The camera quality itself has been improved to 5MP with an LED flash and can also support HD video recording. Jobs also put great focus on the smartphone’s new ‘Retina’ display, which has 960×640 pixels; four times as many pixels as the iPhone 3GS and 78 percent of the pixels on the iPad. Apparently, the resulting 326 pixels per inch is so dense that the human eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels when the phone is held at a normal distance, making text, images and video look much sharper and smoother. In addition Apple has increased the iPhone’s battery life, fuelled by its A4 processor (the same processor used in the iPad). Seven hours of 3G talk time are promised, up to six hours of 3G browsing (10 on WiFi) and up to 10 hours of video playback. Although there’s no enhancement to existing HSDPA connectivity, it does add quad-band HSUPA to provide theoretical peak uplink speeds of 5.8Mb/s.

Jobs talked up the iPhone 4’s status as “the best mobile device for games and entertainment,” featuring a built-in 3-axis gyroscope. HD video capability was also trumpeted as a reason to embrace Apple’s new US$4.99 iMovie for iPhone app, enabling users to combine movie clips, add themes, photos and music, and export it in quality up to 720p HD.

The iPhone 4’s operating system – to be known as iOS 4 – will be available as a free download for older iPhone owners from June 21. New features of the revised OS include – finally – multi-tasking (“We’ve taken a little longer to come up with a good architecture for multitasking,” admitted Jobs) and Apple’s new iAd mobile advertising platform. iAd will debut July 1 with campaigns from AT&T, Best Buy, Nissan and Disney, among others. Apple claims to have iAd commitments for 2010 totaling over US$60 million, which represents almost 50 percent of the total forecasted US mobile ad spending for the second half of 2010. The idea of iAd is that it will allow users to stay within their app while engaging with the ad, rather than opening a new browser. Jobs reiterated the company’s plan to sell and serve the ads, with developers receiving “an industry-standard” 60 percent of the iAd network revenue.

On the subject of revenue, Jobs revealed that the success of its App Store has seen the company part with US$1 billion of revenue to developers. Given that Apple hands over 70 percent of revenue from apps to developers, this suggests Apple’s pioneering App Store has generated a total of US$1.43 billion since launch two years ago (of which Apple has pocketed US$430 million). That US$1.43 billion spans 225,000 different apps (many of which are free, though) and over five billion total app downloads. Meanwhile the iPad now boasts 8,500 native apps and can run over 200,000 iPhone apps, added Jobs. With over 35 million downloads of iPad apps to date (from the two million-plus sales of the device), that works out to be about 17 apps downloaded per iPad.

Other interesting snippets revealed by Jobs include: Microsoft’s Bing search engine will be available on the new iPhone, in addition to Google (the default engine) and Yahoo; and this month will see Apple sell its 100th million iOS device (including all iPhones, iPods touch and iPads).

Finally, there’s Apple’s new iBooks app which will be available for iPhone 4 as a free download from the App Store and includes the new iBookstore. To date over 5 million e-books have been downloaded from a selection of over 60,000 e-books, and Apple is now offering the ability to download the same book to all its devices at no extra charge.