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After all of the speculation about the new iPhone launch, we can now look back and see how we did. I feel that the most important feature of WWDC was largly omitted from all of the hype surrounding the conference. This event was not about hardware and it wasn’t radical changes in Apple’s business plan. It was about function and usability for an already stupendous device. In the end, Apps carried the day.

While Apps seem fairly innocuous, think about them like websites are on a computer. Do you remember the days of computers that weren’t constantly hooked up to the internet? All you had to go with were the applications built into the system and whatever you had on a collection of floppies. When the internet really began to take off, people realized their computer was only limited by the web developer’s ability to code neat things.

The same goes for iPhone Apps. Up until now we have been able to use a closed archetecture with a few applicaitons and a great web browser. The browser makes up somewhat for the lack of dedicated Apps for some tasks, but in the long run, it falls flat. Now, with the App Store about to take flight, the iPhone will, like modern computers, be only limited by the design capabilities of the designers and the physical limitations of the hardware. Since it’s such awesome hardware, I think there really is a great deal of potential.

Let’s look at some of the Apps announced today by Apple’s “premier App creators” who were given advanced notice of what the iPhone was to become:

-Enhanced Websites: Some of the most obvious uses for an iPhone App is to replace an existing web service or web app with a stand-alone program. The examples from today were Ebay and TypePad, who each put out an App to better allow usage of their sites. These Apps are logically free, as their creators want their customers to use their business model, not simply buy some interesting program for their phone. TypePad’s photoblogging feature specifically makes use of the built-in camera and GPS to geotag photos.

-Social Networking/News: These programs are also website, but they are special kinds of websites. The Loopt service looks like it is very dependent on devices like the iPhone, because it works best when you are actually somewhere out in the world. Loopt finds other people and things that are within some radius from your location. The same is true for the AP’s new app to not only access their news, but also post your own reporting for them. I think they like the idea of a free news correspondent on every street corner.

-Technical Service: Some iPhone Apps won’t be all fun and games. Case in point are the Apps made by Modality and MMvista, which both allow users (whether they be doctors or interested patients) to scroll through the human body like a 3D map or look at medial images for close analysis. These kinds of Apps are important in the scheme of things because a business may very well want every employee with an iPhone in hand, ready to access work-related data.

-Games: Finally, the coolest, and likely the most popular, use of the new SDK is for games. Game companies like Sega, Pangea, and Digital Legends spoke at today’s event and showed off their new wares. There are numerous nifty things that iPhone game developers (or regular game makers who port their games to the iPhone) can throw into their designing. The accelerometer in the iPhone makes it great for tilt/steering games, and the multi-touch interface must be making puzzle designers drool at the mouth. Also, the fairly high definition screen will deliver some seriously beautiful graphics.

All in all, Apps will soon take center stage for new and old iPhone users. While iTouch users have to pay a ten dollar fee to access the new firmware (and thus the App Store), I think the variety of free Apps alone is enough to make it worth the money.

[Via our own Tim Bradbury] [Image from Apple]