When Steve Jobs announced Apple’s iPhone at the Macworld show in January, critics pointed out that the gadget — dubbed “the God machine” or “Jesus Phone” by fans — lacked the ability to work with outside applications. Jobs addressed that in San Francisco this morning during his annual Worldwide Developers Conference keynote speech, as the just-announced June 29 release date for the phone nears.
He showed how independent developers can create applications for iPhone that will run on Apple’s Safari browser, but the initial reaction from bloggers covering the speech live was muted. “UH OHS! People in the crowd don’t seem super-enthused. Some are mumbling, most are silent,” Wired blogged, explaining that everyone wanted support for SDK development tools on the iPhone. Having webapps and AJAX on the iPhone would make the limitations of running applications on AT&T’s relatively slow EDGE network worse, Gizmodo said. And Engadget summed up their thoughts on Jobs’ trademark “One More Thing” sign-off pithily: “Weeeeeaaaak.” Commenters on several tech blogs seemed to agree, calling the keynote boring and noting that the head of Apple’s iPhone software seemed to have a bit of trouble using the touch keypad.

With the release date less than three weeks away, will you be standing in line at an Apple store to get an iPhone?