As anticipated, yesterday at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2010 (WWDC2010) in Cupertino, CA, Steve Jobs announced the release of the new iPhone model, the iPhone 4. And, just in case you weren’t stalking the live feeds of Job’s keynote, here is the rundown on what new features and functions the iPhone 4 will have to offer.

Look and Feel

The iPhone 4 will be 24% slimmer than the iPhone 3G and 3Gs, which will make it the slimmest and sleekest Smartphone on the market to date.

This version will have a glass front and back, as well as new stainless steel edging on the sides, so it will look more like the other products in the Apple series, including the iPad, MacBook, and iMac.

The new iPhone will also feature external volume controls, as well as a forward-facing camera with LED flash, and microphones on the top and bottom for improved sound quality. It will also feature lines on the side (black seams as one blogger referred to them) that will function as integrated antenna for Bluetooth, WiFi, and GPS capabilities.

Retina Display

The new, much higher screen resolution of the iPhone 4 is one of the most appealing and welcomed improvements on the technology of the iPhone 3G and 3Gs, and as remarked by The Huffington Post, “the new Retina display is indeed impressive”. Plainly put, objects look brilliant on this 960×640 resolution, 3.5 inch, multi-touch screen, which has 78% of the pixels of an iPad (making it a serious competitor to Sprint’s HTC Evo, which we’ve previously blogged about).

Additionally, Apple has programmed the new iPhone to automatically detect and rescale all native iPhone apps for this newly sized screen, so that developers won’t have to bother with that hassle and Apple can continue supervising all iPhone development processes…

iOS4 & Battery Life

This new generation iPhone will run on an also newly developed OS, announced several months ago, that will now be called iOS4. For consumers, this advancement doesn’t mean too much, except that it will allow for multitasking and the creation of separate folders for organizing apps, which should, generally speaking, enrich the user experience. This functionality raises one major concern, however, and that is battery power. While users still won’t have the option to interchange batteries with the new phone, the battery life of the iPhone 4 will be much better than that of previous versions. Jobs announced that the new microSIM battery will support 7hrs of 3G talk-time, 6hrs of 3G mobile web browsing, 10 hrs of WiFi browsing, 40 hrs of music play, or an incredible 300 hrs of standby operation. We hope this means gone are the days of squeezing the iPhone battery through a whole day of light usage.

HD Video Recording & iMovie

The iPhone 4 may no longer be called the iPhone HD, but that doesn’t mean that it’s without HD capabilities. In fact, with a forward-facing, 5 megapixel camera in addition to a reverse facing camera, the new iPhone will enable users to shoot HD video, and quickly edit their videos using iMovie on the device immediately after capturing them. Furthermore, with the new iPhone, users will be able to add geolocation tags to all of the videos that they shoot, incorporating another layer to the function that presupposes the sharing of information (and now videos) across personal and social networks.

iBooks

Whle this may not be the most elaborate feature of the iPhone 4, for many consumers it could be an exciting development, as it will eliminate the need for separate ‘reader’ devices such as Amazon’s Kindle (or carrying around books). The new iBooks feature will also synchronize with the iPad app that was released by Apple under the same name, so users could switch between reading a book with iBooks on the iPhone and the iPad.

FaceTime

While we might be thrilled by the Retina display and the thinner, sleeker appearance of the new iPhone, no feature or function that Jobs’ announced was as major as the addition of FaceTime to the iPhone 4. FaceTime is a program that will allow iPhone owners to video chat with one another using the 5GB camera’s capacities, as well as stream footage from the forward-facing camera in real time. Of course, for the time being this feature will only work for chats between iPhone 4 owners, but it’s still a pretty revolutionary advancement.

The Big Picture

The new iPhone is a slim, sleek new improvement upon Apple’s iPhone design, but we’re not sure its as innovative as its iPhone predecessors were. Jobs said “there’s no consumer product like this” of the new generation phone, but we’re not sure that’s really the case. For starters, it’s important to keep in mind that device announced was an “iPhone 4” and not an iPhone 4G. This is an important difference because it confirms developers’ suspicion that the new iPhone will continue to function on AT&T’s 3G network, and not a 4G network, like that on which the HTC Evo will operate. Moreover, as exciting as the iPhone 4’s video chat capabilities may be, it bears mentioning that the HTC Evo also has a video chat function and allows for streaming over the mobile web, not just between two Evo users. While the iPhone clearly excels in some fields, like screen resolution, it isn’t so mind-blowingly innovative that there are no other devices of its kind on the market; to the contrary, in some ways, it is quickly following in the footsteps of the Evo, which was released just one week ago.

At the end of the day, the iPhone advancements announced by Jobs today are just further evidence that mobile devices and the mobile web are the technology of the future. And if today was any indication, the mobile market is growing up fast. So whether your plans are to preorder the iPhone 4, or build a mobile website, now is certainly the time to get on board with this fast-paced trend.