By Mark Milian, CNN
June 6, 2011 8:56 a.m. EDT | Filed under: Mobile
Apple is holding its annual Worldwide Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week.
San Francisco (CNN) -- The annual summer Apple event, where the company traditionally announces the newest iPhone, may be missing something on Monday.
An iPhone.
Apple is unlikely to unveil a new mobile phone, as it has done at the last four Worldwide Developers Conferences, starting with the first iPhone in 2007, supply-industry analysts say.
The company may instead announce an iPhone in September, when new iPods are generally paraded on stage, analysts say.
CNN will update this page with news immediately following the keynote.
Live updates from that presentation, which starts at 1 p.m. ET, will be available on the @CNNTech Twitter feed.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs will showcase a new service called iCloud for synchronizing files over the Internet between devices, the company said in a statement. iCloud will host music, videos and photos, according to reports.
The event will also serve as a coming-out party for iOS 5, the next major release of the operating system that runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.
The new version is expected to contain more social-networking features, such as the ability to easily share photos to Twitter, reports say.
iOS 5 may also usher in a new system for application notifications, replacing the pop-ups that users get for new text messages or sports score alerts.
Apple appears to have hired new talent from competitors to make this happen. Last year, Apple hired the designer of the webOS notifications system from Palm. Within the last several weeks, a developer who makes a popular system-alerts utility for "jailbroken" iPhones also took a job at Apple.
Apple executives were recently brimming with optimism about the prospects for the iOS platform, according to a Goldman Sachs report.
The Apple WWDC event will also provide an in-depth look at Mac OS X Lion, the operating system for the company's computers. Apple had demonstrated some features in October. The product is still on target for a release some time in the next few months, possibly as early as Monday.
A summer without a new iPhone certainly breaks with tradition. However, customers can rest knowing that they should benefit from significant improvements to their existing gadgets without having to drop a few hundred dollars on new hardware.
The iOS software is usually distributed for free. The current version of the Mac operating system, called Snow Leopard, sells for $29.
MobileMe costs $99 per year, but it's unclear how much Apple will charge for iCloud. Whether iCloud will replace MobileMe, which is largely viewed as a flop, also could not be learned. But Apple, Amazon.com and other retailers have recently stopped selling MobileMe in their stores.
Credit: CNN (www.cnn.com)
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