10:49AM - “We’ve improved the fitness experience as well. Right out of the box, you can go on a walk or a run as well without adding sensors or devices.”

10:48AM - Updates: multi-touch display even easier to navigate with bigger icons. So UI changes?

10:48AM - “I’d like to give you updates to two of those lines today. First, iPod nano.”

10:47AM - Eddie’s turned it over to Phil Schiller. “I’m really pleased to talk to you about the iPod. We started the iPod simply because we love music. We still love music, and we’re still making great iPods.”

10:47AM - It’s funny how traffic on these live keynotes starts to wane as Apple goes over the stuff they’ve already announced / launched. I feel ya, folks. Let’s get to the good stuff, shall we?

10:45AM - Video demo time! Alright everyone, go hit the bathroom or grab a beverage.

10:45AM - Reviewing iTunes Match service — again, review from past announcements. Granted, it’s not out yet, but you’ve probably heard about it by now. “It scans and matches your library against our 20m songs, we’ll upload what we don’t find, we’ll stream…” wait, did he just say stream? I don’t think he meant to say stream.

10:43AM - All part of iCloud. Free for iOS 5 and Lion users, with upgrades from device. “A really great add-on to iCloud is iTunes Match.”

10:42AM - Set location sharing blocks of time — “at the end of the day, location sharing stops automatically. Easily locate friends and family, temp sharing options, simple privacy controls…”

10:41AM - “Now, when I’m in Disneyland, I can see where my family is.”

10:41AM - “What if you could find your family and friends? Today we’re launching a new app called Family and Friends.” Foursquare, you ready?

10:41AM - Backup: daily backups from your iOS devices, “easily restored right from iCloud.” I’m not so sure about this one, I kind of like owning my backups, you know? Next: syncing contacts, calendars, mail — an ad-free me.com mail account. Find My iPhone is part of iCloud. Yep.

10:39AM - Talking about docs in the cloud, edits in Pages on the iPhone updated across devices. Again, we’re still in review mode here.

10:38AM - iTunes in the cloud, done. Next: Photo Stream. You know, it’s like iTunes in iCloud, but for photos.

10:37AM - Over 1/3 is purchased on iOS devices. “Keeping it in sync can be frustrating.” You can say that again. Walking us through the whole cloud syncing scenario, you get the gist.

10:36AM - Eddie Cue is up to talk iCloud now.

10:36AM - Free update, available October 12th! Finally a launch date!

10:35AM - Mail enhancements. Next up: PC-free. “We have a lot of customers who want to use the iPad or iPhone as their only device.” Well, now you can, and it ain’t too shabby. “These are just ten of the new features in iOS 5.”

10:34AM - Side note! We’re doing a TON of traffic right now, which is awesome! But if you should happen to see a hiccup in the auto-updating, don’t be afraid to refresh the page real quick to kick. Don’t do that right this second though, or you’ll probably take us down. Okay? Okay.

10:33AM - Next up: Safari. “We’ve added a number of things, including Reader. We take the story on the page, we format it perfectly on the device, it’s all loaded so you can just scroll through and read it.” Sure, but I still prefer Instapaper.

10:32AM - Edit photos on-device; crop, rotate, remove red-eye. Next up: Game Center. “It’s only been out for about a year, but it’s been a huge hit.” Oh? “67m users signed up. Adding achievement points, photos, friend recommendations…”

10:31AM - Camera: home screen shortcut — which I do indeed love — and HDR. But will Apple fix the extreme camera slowness in iOS 5? You know what I’m talking about.

10:30AM - “We’ve integrated Twitter into many of our built-in apps. Tweet photos, web sites, videos, locations from maps. Deep integration from Twitter.” Next: Newsstand. Sorry, but I’m bored. New stuff, please!

10:29AM - “Push to all device; pick up on one device where you left off on another.” Aww yeah. Next: Reminders. Location-based reminders with geo-fencing. Again, all this is stuff you’re probably familiar with if you saw the original iOS 5 announcements. Next: Twitter integration. Oh, did I mention Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is right over there?

10:28AM - Notifications! Yeah, you know all about this one. iMessage. New iOS-based messaging service, which I assume you’ve probably heard of as well by this point!

10:27AM - iOS 5 time! “We’ve already seeded more than 100k developers, and they love it. We can’t wait to get it in everyone else’s hands.” Recap time! 200 new user features, talking about ten of the top.

10:26AM - “We’ll affix Apple designed postage to the card.” Of course you will! $2.99 in the US, $4.99 anywhere else. Oct 12th.

10:25AM - “We’ll print it on high quality 100% cotton paper.” Nice! They’ll print it and mail it — push notification on mail delivery through USPS. “Very cool.” Applause. Hmm, paper. Okaaay.

10:24AM - “Apple has paid developers more than $3b.” New app today: Cards. “Create and mail beautiful cards right from your iPhone or iPod touch.”

10:24AM - “All of these together makes the App Store the number one store for downloading apps. Customers have downloaded more than 18b apps. And it’s accelerating. They’re downloading them at a clip of more than 1 billion per month.” That is pretty insane.

10:23AM - Forstall: “already, more than 500k apps in the app store. More than 140k of these are made specifically for the iPad.”

10:22AM - “We’ve passed a quarter billion unit sales mark.” Damn. Forstall is up for iOS time!

10:22AM - “92% of Fortune 500 are testing or deploying iPad. This is in less than 18 months. Unheardof.

10:21AM - “It’s not just in the classroom. Pilots are replacing 40 pound flight bags with iPads — making pilots more efficient, and planes more fuel efficient. Yes, that’s true!” Chuckles. iPad in medicine: “80% of the top hospitals in the US are now testing or piloting the iPad.”

10:20AM - “It’s not just in the classroom. Pilots are replacing 40 pound flight bags with iPads — making pilots more efficient, and planes more fuel efficient. Yes, that’s true!” Chuckles. iPad in medicine: “80% of the top hospitals in the US are now testing or piloting the iPad.”

10:19AM - “The customer satisfaction ratings show a 95% score in a recent survey. They’re showing up everywhere. In schools they’re helping kids learn in amazing new ways. … every state in the US now has an iPad deployment or pilot in place today.” Wow.

10:18AM - “We believe that over time all phones become smartphones. This market is an enormous opportunity. That’s iPhone, more coming up on iPhone.” Chuckles. Next: iPad.

10:17AM - The customer satisfaction numbers are kind of hilarious. “These are numbers that are hard to imagine for any product.” JD Power rated #1. “Despite all this success and momentum, the iPhone has 5% share of the worldwide market of handsets. I could have shown a much larger number if I just showed smartphones, but that’s not how we look at it.”

10:16AM - “That momentum is far outpacing the industry. It’s not just consumer, 93% of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying the iPhone. It’s consistently rated #1 in every customer satisfaction ranking I can find.”

10:15AM - iPhone: “What’s amazing is that the iPhone 4 has sold over half of our total iPhones sold in the entire time we’ve been selling iPhones. It’s the number one smartphone in the world.

10:15AM - “You can’t talk about music without talking about iTunes. We started 8 years ago, we had 200k songs in our music library. We now have 100x that many: 20m songs. It’s now the #1 music store in the world, with over 16b song downloads.” He called it mind-boggling, and yeah, it kind of is. A couple years ago they were still contending with Walmart and Target and Tower.

10:14AM - “To put that in context, it took Sony 30 years to sell 230k Walkman cassette players. The MP3 market is a mature market, and the iPod is still a large and important market for Apple. We’ve sold 45 million iPods in the last year ending in June. What’s more encouraging, is almost half of those are going to people buying their first iPod.”

10:13AM - “Across the last ten years the iPod became the number one music player in the world. And in the US the market share has been above 70% for a very long time. Over that period of time we’ve cumulatively sold 300m iPods around the world.” Damn. That is a lot of iPods.

10:13AM - Next up: music (i.e. iTunes and iPod). “It was only 10 years ago that iPod launched. It revolutionized the whole music industry. It reminded us how much we all loved music.”

10:12AM - “For those of you that have followed Apple for a while remember that it wasn’t too long ago that this number was in the mid single digits.” Yeap, that number has a long memory. “We have an incredible ceiling here, and a long way to go.”

10:11AM - “Every single quarter for 5 years the Mac has outgrown the PC market! We are now approaching 60 million users. In US retail Macs are now selling in about 1/4 PCs in the store.”

10:11AM - “In fact, the MacBook Pro and iMac are the #1 best selling notebook and desktop in the US. This momentum is not just limited to a mode. The Mac outgrew the PC market by almost 6x. This is incredible!”

10:10AM - MacBook Air: “Our customers love it, and our competitors are trying to copy it. … The Air is just a portion of our entire lineup of Macs, which are the best we’ve ever shipped.”

10:09AM - “For the first time we’ve offered Mac OS as a digital download. The results are staggering, I’m proud to announce Lion has been downloaded 6 million times.” Way ahead of Snow Leopard. It took Windows 7 20 weeks to reach what it took Lion 2 weeks to get to in terms of install base.

10:08AM - “Our products are at the core of what we do, and are responsible for the momentum we have.” Reviewing four product groups, starting with Lion.

10:08AM - Applause. Tim’s all stoked looking. “I’ve watched that 100 times and I could watch it 100 more.”

10:07AM - As you may know from previous Apple events, when they show videos, stuff gets kind of hard to talk about. So yeah, there’s a video playing right now of a ton of really excited Chinese consumers at the Shanhai store buying stuff and getting pumped. Yep.

10:06AM - Still reviewing Hong Kong store opening. “We sold more Macs on opening day in this store than we had in any store in the world. … Now, rather than listen to me talk about this, I’d like to show you a short video.” Retail promo video time!

10:05AM - “This is our largest store in Asia, and it set a record by welcoming 100k visitors on opening weekend. We thought we’d done well by welcoming 100k visitors in LA in the course of one month.” Man, Tim is really subdued today!

10:04AM - Hmm, Tim’s slides aren’t advancing. Ah, there we go. Reviewing two new Chinese Apple stores.

10:04AM - “It’s an extraordinary time to be at Apple. No more is that evident than at our retail stores.”

10:04AM - “Today we’ll remind you of the uniqueness of this company as we announce innovations from our mobile OS, to applications, to services, to hardware, and more importantly the integration of all these into a powerful, simple, integrated experience.”

10:03AM - “In particular, I want to welcome you to this room, that we call our Town Hall. This room has quite a history at Apple. Just ten years ago we launched the original iPod here.”

10:02AM - “I consider it a privilege of a lifetime to have worked here for almost 14 years and I am very excited about this new role. I want to welcome you to this campus, it serves kind of a second home for many of us.”

10:02AM - “It is a pleasure to host you today. I love Apple.”

10:02AM - No standing O for Tim. “Good morning, this is my first product launch since being named CEO.”

10:01AM - Tim’s out!

10:01AM - I love that people are actually taking photos with iPads. Good luck with that.

10:00AM - Stones again, Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Let’s do this thing!

10:00AM - Presentation starting soon, turn off your devices, usual PA announcements.

9:58AM - Also, our ops team just told me I’m crazy. These things melt servers.

9:57AM - So our Chartbeat shows almost 40k people on the page right now. Welcome! Also: you folks can do better, this is an iPhone launch! Go tell your pals!

9:49AM - Okay, we’re finally in and seated. Rolling Stones’s “Under My Thumb” is playing. Rockin’ to the oldies.

9:41AM - Alright, the line is moving in!

9:32AM - Spotted: Ralph De La Vega, head of AT&T Mobility, otherwise known as the guy who won’t make your cellphone work better.

9:29AM - Watching folks funnel in, and chatting with our old pals at Engadget.

9:24AM - Alright, we’re here! And hey, this time there’s breakfast being served!

7:29AM - Alright, it’s the morning of the big 2011 iPhone event, can you sense the anticipation? I can — or maybe that’s just my Twitter @ replies blowing up.

Out here in SF things are still quiet and kind of dark, and I’m getting ready to make the trip down to Cupertino in a few. Expect updates soon!