By Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan, CNBC-TV18

The much-hyped Apple 3G iphone is expected to be unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference at San Francisco today.

Lines have been piling up like in every Apple Macworld. This is the first time there is so much hype around the Worldwide Developers Conference. Usually, Steve Jobs never makes an address here. But this time it is widely expected. He is going to announce the new 3G iPhone and fingers are crossed that it is probably going to hit India towards the end of the year. Rumours are flying about as they always do before any big Apple launch about what that new iPhone would have; 3G is the most obvious choice.

There are very strong rumours that it could have GPS partly to do with US FCC rules and partly because location-based services are becoming really big. Some people are saying that if they have 3G, they might throw in the extra camera to do video chat.

The most important thing from the developer’s point of view and from a software writer’s point of view, is that this is the first iPhone, which will officially let third party applications run on it. The earlier iPhone had only the programmes that came on the phone.