At 9pm tonight, a magical day begins. Nerd Christmas. The fable behind Nerd Christmas is well known - once a year, a strange and mysterious man who lives in a secret workshop in the California mountains emerges from his tireless work of making magical toys. From around the world, Nerds send their Leaders to gather in an auditorium, and the man, shrouded in black, reveals a new toy that will soon be distributed to all corners of the earth. And there is much rejoicing. For traditionalists, Nerd Christmas has become a little overblown: for weeks beforehand, it is all you can hear about on TV or in the news. Every year it seems that we start preparing for Nerd Christmas a little earlier. We all worry that one day the Strange and Mysterious Man might no longer be with us, and Nerd Christmas could be gone forever (all though some believe his spirit will remain looming over the Magical Factory and will guide the little elves to continue making their wonderful toys.) Fun and games aside, a few thoughts on what to expect from Steve Jobs at Apple's WWDC event today (tonight, UAE time): - Expect: Obviously the fourth generation iPhone design, with the new physical stylings and hardware as scooped by Gizmodo. - Hope: A significant tweak to the iPhone operating system, which is really starting to look outdated when compared to some of the things being done with Google's Android system. In particular.... -Apple needs to get its web-integration game on, something that Android totally whips the iPhone at. Example: over the weekend I managed to break my Nexus One phone, completely kill it. The next day I bought an HTC Desire (essentially a Nexus One with a fancy layer of skin stretched over it). I turned it on, typed in my Google username and password, and within a few minutes I had my old phone exactly as it was when it broke, sitting in my hands again. Same address book / contacts, same pictures, same text messages, everything was sychronised from the cloud with one login. Apple are nowhere near this. There is some speculation that they will make MobileMe, their "cloud" service, free. While this will be cool, as anyone who has used MobileMe would testify, it is nowhere near the leading edge of these online-type services. It needs major improvements - and in an ideal world, Apple would give up on an area it clearly is not competitive in, and let users choose their own cloud service. In a second-to-ideal world, MobileMe could remain expensive and irrelevant, and a new dimension could be added to iTunes, making it a sort of web-based system for managing your digital life. - Hope: Some kind of iPhone operating system tweak that allows for applications / widgets running on the home screen. This has been used with great effect in Android, Nokia, and Palm's WebOS, and is really useful, especially for things like time and weather, notifications, phone management (turning WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS on/off), etc. When you look at the iPhone OS, with its screen after screen of square buttons in a grid with no dynamic content and no flexibility, it just feels like the past. A beautiful past, but the past. - Expect: Changes in iPhone hardware to be accompanied by operating system tweaks: a front facing camera to come with video chat, etc. - Wildcard: Some kind of major jab at Google, which has clearly started tightening the screws on Apple in recent months. Deep integration of search from a rival company into the iPhone / iPad operating systems, for example. - Possible Moment of Greatness: Connected to the previous Wildcard - as the rumor mill says, a really major opportunity still exists for whichever company can do a wonderful integration of internet into our TV sets. Apple has tried and failed in the past, but with Google recently announcing its own major push into TV, what better way to poke a competitor in the eye AND kickstart the fundamental transformation of yet another industry (and one of the only ones yet to be truly transformed by the internet)?