Today’s the big day: The opening of  Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference and the day Apple finally talked about its new and anticipated iPhone, the 3GS (for Speed). We’re covering all the details about the amazing, feature-packed 3GS in another story.

What about the rest of us? Don’t we get any goodies? Of course we do. Here are eight things to be glad about:

1. Get as many as 100 new features: OS 3.0 will debut on June 17 with scads of new capability, mucho gracias to the complementary OS 3.0 developer’s kit.  It will be free to all iPhone users (3G and original). It will be $9.99 for iPod touch users.
2. Be and stay in touch more: Push notification arrives, finally. You can be inside an app and be alerted when you receive a text message, a special announcement or anything similar.
3. Extend your hardware: You can play your iPhone and iPod touch through hardware such as powered speakers and automobile sound systems using Bluetooth (developers are no longer limited to just Apple’s implementation of Bluetooth).
4. Get more GPS: Because of the work that went into making the iPhone and iPod touch talk to other hardware, you can now get more accurate GPS, with turn-by-turn directions, text-to-speech directions.
5. Find your phone: Apple created a Find My iPhone service for MobileMe account holders to find, recover or erase its content. Using any Web browser you can search and pinpoint your Phone on a map. If you’re unable to retrieve your iPhone, you can send it a remote wipe to erase its contents. If you lose the phone at home, you can send a message and it will audibly alert you to let you know where it’s hiding.
6. Play fancier and shinier new games: Play music from your iTunes catalog while you play; better graphics and shading. Play against other gamers — peer-to-peer — using Bluetooth. Play games with gamers anywhere in the world over Wi-Fi. In game voice chat.
7. Buy upgrades from within the app. If you’re a gamer, you can now buy weapons, armor and other mojo. You can read a book and pay for it a chapter at a time. One company already has deals to put 50 magazines, 70 newspapers and 1 million books in your palm. Pay for what you eat.
8. See more and limit what you see: Parents now have the ability to limit what their children see and hear on their devices. They’ll also start seeing some apps come with ratings.

We’ve got lots of other reasons to be happy in more parts coming!

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category: Breaking News