Joe Nocera buried his lead.

The New York Times columnist — and former Fortune editor — waited until the end of Saturday’s 1,700-word “Talking Business” column about the health of Apple’s CEO and the secrecy that surrounds it to reveal that on Thursday afternoon, several hours after he’d gotten his final “Steve’s health is a private matter” from Apple’s public relations machine, he got a call from Steve Jobs himself.

“This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”

Jobs, according to Nocera, said he would share some details about the health condition that made him to look so thin and haggard at his last public appearace — and triggered two share-punishing rounds of speculation on Wall Street — if Nocera agreed to keep the conversation off the record.

Nocera agreed, and reported only that nothing Jobs told him …

“contradicted the reporting that [Times reporter] John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than ‘a common bug,’ they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer.”

The “common bug” is a reference to the explanation for Jobs’ weight loss that Apple’s PR department put out in June — an explanation that Nocera feels fell somewhat short of the truth. Markoff reported on Wednesday that Jobs had had an unnamed surgical procedure earlier this year related to his loss of weight, and Nocera adds that he had learned that Jobs was having ongoing digestive difficulties stemming from the cancer surgery he had four years ago — the details of which were first reported by Fortune (see here).

All this leads Nocera to the broader point he wants to make about Apple:

“Apple simply can’t be trusted to tell truth about its chief executive. Under Mr. Jobs, Apple has created a culture of secrecy that has served it well in many ways — the speculation over which products Apple will unveil at the annual MacWorld conference has been one of the company’s best marketing tools. But that same culture poisons its corporate governance. Apple tells analysts far less about its operations than most companies do. It turns low-level decisions into state secrets. Directors are often left out of the loop. And it dissembles with impunity.” (link)

So, yes, Nocera thinks Steve Jobs is an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law.

But Jobs may have the last laugh. Twice in his column, Nocera refers to things that happened during Apple’s (AAPL) third quarter conference call on Tuesday afternoon.

In fact, the conference call happened on Monday.

UPDATE: The error in the printed edition of the paper has been corrected in the online version.

The following is a live blog from Steve Jobs’ keynote from the great hall at Moscone West. It started just after 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) and ended at 11:50 a.m. PT. Apple’s press release is now available here; you can watch the event in QuickTime or MPEG-4 here.

The posts that follow are in reverse-chronological order, most recent first.

11:45 a.m. Wrapping it up. Steve Jobs just announced the big news: a price point of $199 for the 8 GB iPhone 3G and $299 for 16 GB iPhone 3G

The 8 GB is available only in black.The 16GB model also comes in white.

Will be rolling out in 22 countries on July 11. The price is max of $199 all around the world. New ad. Plays it twice. Introduces team. Tells the developers to go make some great products. And it’s over. 11:50 am PT

11:34: Jobs has just introduced the iPhone 3G and is demoing how much faster it is. People laughing at how long it’s taking to download a photo on Edge: 59 seconds vs. 21 seconds for 3G.

36% faster than Nokia.

Comparing to Wi-Fi. 17 seconds on Wi-Fi. (Which Wi-Fi, we wonder?)

3.6 times faster than EDGE on map downloading.

Great battery life he says. 300 hours standby time. 2G talk time 8 to 10 hours. 3G talk time: 5 hours.

Browsing: 5 to 6 hours of hight speed browsing

Video: 7 hours.

Audio: 24 hours.

GPS built in. BIG APPLAUSE.

Also data from cell towers and WiFi and now GPS too. Using GPS can do tracking. Demo driving down Lombard street (recorded earlier), tracking as you move. Little blue dot wiggling down the twisty street.

Third party: you saw the great apps.

More countries; we distribute in 6 countries today. We set goal to 12 or maybe 25. Colors in map in Apple red to the tune of “It’s A Small World After All.” African countries one by one. This could take awhile. Seventy countries over the next several months. Next time you’re in Malta…

More affordable: $199 for iPhone 3G 8 GB.

11:28: Steve Jobs is back. Now I’m going to talk about the iPhone. In a few weeks, the first birthday. Photos of launch. Time magazine cover. “This is the phone that has changed phones forever.” What makes us happiest is that users love their iPhones. 90% customer satisfaction. 98% are mobile browsing, from nothing. 94% e-mail. 90% text messaging. 80% using 10 features or more.

We have sold 6 million iPhones so far. Until we ran out a few weeks ago.

Next challenges.

First: 3G network.

Second: Enterprise support

Third: Third-party software

Fourth: More countries.

Five: More affordable.

Today We’re introducing the iPhone 3G.

11:22 Schiller demo of MobileMe on an iPhone. Push e-mail. Invitation to lunch. Restaurant. Map. Menu. Save as contact. Pushed to MobileMe. Contact is already on MobileMe. Moves dates. Pushes them through the cloud back and forth to Mac and iPhone. Photos sent through the cloud. Applause. So that’s MobileMe. Terrible name, but seems pretty cool. Service available for $99 a year with 20 gigabytes on memory (same price as .Mac, but twice the memory). It replaces .Mac. Available in July. You keep your .mac addresses. (Phew)

11:18 Demo of MobileMe on a Mac. He’s very excited that a desktop-like app can work as a Web 2.0 app, as if Google apps didn’t exist. Perhaps its faster and more responsive and better integrated, but we won’t know until we do it hands on. Embedded Google map built into address book is cool. Move meeting around. Skims really quickly through photos. Resizing is also pretty fast. iDisk works like before, as near as I can tell. One button log out.

11:14: Phil Schiller. Mobile Me. “Exchange for the rest of us.” We can all get push e-mail, contacts and calendars right to our devices. Stores your info in the cloud. Can get to it on any device: Mac, PC, iPhone. Keeps everything up to date all the time. E-mail gets pushed to all devices. Meeting change gets uploaded and pushed to all devices. If a contact changes, see it immediately. (What Exchange does already.)

Works with Mail, iCal, Address book. Also works with Microsoft Outlook. Built a suite of Web 2.0 apps to give desktop experience on the web.

Get e-mail experience that feels like desktop Mail. Navigation tools on top left. Contacts. Calendar. Gallery. Send to Mobile Me is a button on iPhone. Send photo to Gallery. Docs as well. Goes to demo.

11:13 Jobs: Something entirely new called MobileMe (the rumors were right about the name). Introduces Phil Schiller.

11:12: Jobs on third way to add apps. Called Ad Hoc. For, say, a professor and his students. Can get certified for up to 100 iPhones. The users download and sync through iTunes. Total three ways to distribute apps: Enterprise, App Store, Ad Hoc.

11:04: Steve Jobs back on the stage. New features: Contact search. Full iWorks document support. Also all of MS Office (added Powerpoint to Word and Excel). Also bulk delete and move. Also save images to library. Added scientific calculator (just turn to landscape mode). Added parental controls. “Some teenagers might not like this, but that’s the way it has to be.” Added many languages. Two forms of entry for Japanese. Also two for Chinese, one where you draw the character with your finger. You can switch between all the languages on the fly. “Better than having a lot of plastic keys on your keyboard.”

Apple 2.0 free software update in early July (groans) and got price down to $9.95 for iPhone touch owners.

App Store. Unveiled in March. All iPhones. Wirelessly download. Automatic notification of update. 10 MB or less can download on cellular, WiFi or through iTunes store. (He never says when the App Store launches.)

Enterprises want another way to distribute apps so they work only on their phones. (Scattered applause from IT guys).

10:59: Scott Forestall summing up after all the demos. One feature request not currently in the SDK. Instant messaging client wants to alert you to a message when the client isn’t running. Can’t let it to run in the background, firstly because of battery life issues. Second: performance turns sluggish. Samsung uses a task manager. Big laugh at how complicated it looks. (Although we use the same thing on a Mac when it slows down.) Better solution: provide a push notification service to all developers. (Big applause.) Maintains a persistent IP notification through Apple. 3 types: badges (i.e. how many messages waiting), alert sounds, custom text alerts (like a SMS). It scales to many 3rd party services, but only one connection to the phone. Preserves battery life. Maintains performance. All works over the air. WiFi and cellular network. Available in September, but being seeded next month. Applause.

10:57: Last demo (phew): Digital Legends Entertainment. From Spain, just started developing two weeks ago, if you can believe that. A veteran game developer, new to platform. Ported game called Crawl (?) that is a 3-D game with caves, monsters, giants, etc. Expected to be ready by September.

10:54: MIMvista. Another medical app. Is this a theme? Moving through a CT scan and a PET scan combined with two fingers. It’s like looking into a body in real time. Zoom with pinch and double tap. Scroll through slices. Change contrast or level. Measurement tool lets you measure, say, size of a tumor. Remove with a shake. (applause). Movie: change color and twirling a body that doctors could review with patient. Look for at launch of App Store. No price given.

10:51: Modality for med students to learn anatomy. Using medical illustrations to create electronic flash cards. Zoom into a heart. Unintended laugh when he says “imagine doing this on any other mobile device.” Quotes student who said he learned 5 new brain terms while waiting in line for his latte. Going to K-12. Dozens of apps ble at launch. No price given.

10:48: MLB.com. Official website for Major League Baseball. New app called @bat. All games. Live ones on top. Tie score in Yankee game. Updates all the time. Added real time video highlights. Pretty impressive video, shown “minutes” after it happens on the field. “On Wi-Fi or EDGE.” Hmm. No mention of 3G by anyone yet. No price given, but MLB is usually a subscription service.

10:45: Cow Music. Solo developer from British insurance industry who did this in his spare time. Mark Terry. App called Band. Creating music on iPhone. Piano. Drum. 12-bar blues in one interface. Big applause! Bass guitar. Whoops and claps. A few weeks time. No price given.

10:41: Pangea Software. Ported two games from Mac OS X to the iPhone. First: Inigmo (spelling?) Control droplets of water through 50 levels. Force fields, switches, etc. Hundreds of droplets bouncing like ping pong balls. Second: Cro-Mag Rally. Cave man racing game. Demos glaciers. 10 cars and 1 sub to choose from. Took 3 days to get each game up and running, or at least playable. The iPhone is the steering wheel. Turn iPhone left, the car goes left. 5-10 minutes to add in accelerometer steering. $9.99 each at launch.

10:39: Associated Press. Shows an update of the AP Mobile News Network it launched in May. Using new GPS chip, filters news based on your location. Encourage users to send photos from their iPhones directly to the AP (!).

10:36: Next up: TypePad. Largest professional blogging platform. Creates a post, blog the moment with a photo, or blog a photo from yesterday. Browses photo album, picks a photo, scales, chooses pix, chooses which of his several blogs, chooses categories, adds a bit of commentary, and finally, publishes. Free at launch of Apps Store. (Could this be leading to Steve Jobs announcement when it’s going to open?)

10:33 Next up: Loopt. Where you are, where your friends are. Little yellow pin shows you where you are, blue shows you where your friends are. Pinching, dragging, tapping. Sees a friend a few blocks away. Can see what she’s doing. Her pix, her messages. Messages her to see if she’s free. Can give directions in one click. Location plus contact list plus information about local places means you never have to eat lunch alone again. Free when Apps Store launches.

10:30: Next up: eBay. Auctions on the iPhone, now the No. 1 mobile device on eBay. Home page shows what you are winning and losing. Touch on item, bring up details. Enters a bid. $180 for a Canon camera. Back in the lead! Next, a $12 million house in Mexico. Nice photos on golf course. He chickens out. Ebay app available for free when the Apps store goes live.

10:27: Forestall is about to bring developers to the stage to demo stuff they’ve done in 3 months with the SDK. First up: Sega with Super Monkey Ball. All four of the classic Monkeys! (The crowd giggles.) Showing how the tilt control keeps up with the player’s moves. Applause when he makes the first goal. Price: $9.99 on the Apps Store. Applause.

10:26: Forestall is quoting from developers who have used the platform and the press, e.g. David Pogue of The New York Times, who hasn’t.

10:22: Forestall is done. He’s built an application that searches for names within a certain distance in his address book on an iPhone simulator. It’s pretty impressive, but as I recall he gave this same demo three months ago. Oh, he’s taking it one step further: compiling the code so that it actually runs on an iPhone, although he doesn’t show that step.

10:19: Scott Forestall is going into an SDK demo. A lot of very tiny code on the screen. Some of the language is quite evocative. Like the “controller glue” and the “cocoa touch controls.”

10:18: As far as I can tell, this was all announced months ago.

10:15. Video over. Next up, the SDK. Brings up Scott Forestall. The APIs. The framework. The kernel. Cocoa Touch. The core services layer. It’s all the same stuff the Apple programmers have in house. This means a lot to the developers. This is what they were hoping to get exactly one year ago. Instead Jobs gave them a Web development kit that satisfied no one.

10:11: He’s rolling a video of people praising the enterprise features of Apple 2.0. The Army guy gets a big laugh when he says his enterprise is like any other except people shoot at his.

10:10: Steve Jobs is starting with a general overview of Apple 2.0 software. So far, this is all a recap of the stuff he laid out at the SDK announcement.

10:07 A peek at Snow Leopard coming after lunch.

10:06: Record 5,200 attendees. 147 sessions. 85 on the Mac, 62 on the iPhone. 169 hands-on labs, 1,000 engineers on hand.

10:06: Steve Jobs runs up the stairs.

10:01: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Turn off cellphone announcement

9:59: Air thick with anticipation and reality distortion. Almost constant flashes, like a ballpark before a record is about to be broken, as people take pictures of the empty stage.

9:55: A rush of warm bodies as they fill the empty VIP seats with general admission. There are at least two overflow rooms for people who can’t get seats in the main hall.

9:41: We’re in.The huge room is as cold as a refrigerator. According to one green-shirted usher, it holds slightly more than 2,000 people. According to another, it holds 2,800. The press and general admission section filled up quickly. There are still empty seats in VIP.

9:40: The doors are open.

9:35: Buttonhole Walt Mossberg of The Wall St. Journal. “Do you have one yet?” we ask him.

He cups his ear as if hard of hearing: “What? I can’t hear you.”

I repeat the question. He repeats the same pantomime. That is code for, “yes I have been given a 3G iPhone for review, but I am under nondisclosure and can’t talk about it.” Or maybe he’s just trying to leave that impression.

9:20: Leaving the comfort of free Apple Wi-Fi and getting in line. Fingers crossed.

9:00: A lot of preening and displays of feathers among the tech press. They have a whole hour with nothing to do but talk to each other. This is probably not a good thing.

8:48: News flash from the outside world: The Apple Store has posted the yellow “We’ll be back soon” sign that signals the imminent release of new product.

8:45: A bomb-sniffing dog has arrived. She’s a German shepherd and like all bomb-sniffing dogs I’ve met, she’s very well behaved. Her name is Yana.

8:40: On the third floor, where the filthy press are being plied with croissants and fruit juices, there are lots of Wi-Fi antennas and not enough power outlets. I’ve parked under a column and plugged in. We’re live again.

8:22: Apple staffers in green t-shirts gather in a corner like a school of tiny coral fish hiding from the barracuda.

8:20: Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!

8:15: Registration painless. Developers march by in phalanxes, munching on sticky buns as they are transported from breakfast on the first floor to the developer holding area on the second.

8:10: We’re in. A lot of Japanese journalists with heavy video equipment lined up early.

7:54: VZAccess is misbehaving badly, and we haven’t even entered Moscone. This could be tricky.

7:20: The press are being kept at bay until 8:00 a.m. It’s probably just as well.

7:15: The doors have opened for registration and Apple staffers are tossing black T-shirts to the faithful as they file in.

7:00 a.m. PT: The doors haven’t opened yet and there’s already a queue that stretches around the block and out of sight.

Old links, soon to be outdated:

• What’s Steve Jobs got up his sleeve?
• A collection of 3G iPhone spy shots
• Videos of previous Steve Jobs keynotes
• How to cash in on the 3G iPhone buzz
• 3G iPhone: Steve Jobs to deliver keynote June 9

The editors at USA Today, we notice, haven’t waited for the actual event to put it in the past tense. Their Monday morning, pre-keynote headline: “It’s presto, change-o as new iPhone is unveiled“

[Update: This was a bust. There was no such device introduced on Monday.]

Score one for The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) — maybe.

Only hours before Monday’s opening of World Wide Developers Conference, they posted the first leaked photograph of a new Apple product — or what certainly seems to be a real product — and it’s not an iPhone.

It’s called Mac Fusion, according to the promotional copy that surrounds the photo, and looks like a mini-Mac Mini — or an Apple TV into which someone has cut a slot wide enough for a CD or DVD.

The headline in display type — “Bridge the gap” — fits the two-bridges theme set by Apple’s e-mail invitation. And it’s a product aimed at developers, which makes sense given that WWDC is, after all, a developers conference.

If this is a fake, it’s a very good one. The copy certainly reads like it came out of Apple’s (AAPL) marketing department:

“Building your applications for the Mac has never been easier. Mac Fusion was designed exclusively for new developers wishing to port their existing programs to the Mac without breaking the bank. Mac Fusion allows you to explore the power and stability of Max OS X while keeping the ability to run alternate operating systems such as WIndows or Linux, via Boot Camp.”

That’s not something intended for the consumer market. No price is indicated, nor shipping date, but there is a big Buy Now button on the page, which would suggest sooner rather than later.

[Photo courtesy of TUAW.]

How big is the buzz around Apple’s (AAPL) forthcoming iPhone?

Here’s one way to gauge it: track keyword searches using Google’s cool Trends tool, available here. With this free widget you can enter one or a series of search terms and instantly get a sense of how often they are invoked over time.

For example, a simple request for the graph of searches on Google (GOOG) for “3g iphone” over the past 12 months yields the fever chart below (subscribers click here):

Note the gradual rise in interest as Steve Jobs’ June 9 keynote approaches, which is not surprising. What is surprising is the fall-off in “News reference volume” in the bottom graph, a decline that seems genuine and not an artifact of Google’s data collection methodology. (There is no similar fall-off in, for example, Barack Obama searches.) This suggests that, although interest continues to grow among the Google-searching public, the tech press may have developed a case of 3G fatigue.

Google Trends also shows you where these searches are coming from. Here’s that data for the chart above:

Check out the size of that Hong Kong bar! How is it that an island with less than 1/40 the population of the United States generates three times as many hits? [Correction: Google is showing something more like searches per capita; see here. Still, there seems to be a lot of interest in the 3G iPhone in Hong Kong.] Let’s zero in on Hong Kong’s 3G iPhone searches:

This shows a sharp rise in searches that began in the middle of May, even before last week’s announcement that Hutchison Telecommunications would be bringing the iPhone to Hong Kong and Macau.

Here’s one final chart to put things in perspective. It maps 3G iPhone searches against RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry and simple iPhone searches, without 3G.

Note that despite the recent uptick in searches for 3G iPhone, they don’t rise to the level of BlackBerry searches. Moreover, neither can come close to the buzz for the original iPhone, especially when the device was launched last June.

There’s lots of data to be gleaned by tracking Google Trends. If you find something particularly noteworthy or surprising, take a snapshot and post it in the comment stream.

Thursday was a red-letter day for 3G iPhone rumors. On Wall St., the “rumor of a rumor” of an iPhone delay was enough to drive Apple (AAPL) share prices down 5 points in midafternoon trading. Meanwhile, a dozen subway stops to the north, a line 60 customers deep had formed spontaneously outside the company’s flagship Fifth Ave. store. According to Engadget, at least some of the people in the queue thought the new iPhone had already arrived.

So it was refreshing to receive a note to clients from Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster on Friday morning with some sensible advice about what to expect when Steve Jobs takes the stage at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference on June 9. According to Munster, look for:

• A new iPhone. Like every Apple analyst on record, he believes Jobs will take this opportunity to unveil an iPhone. But following up on a May 20 note in which Munster cautioned investors to keep their expectations in check, he believes the new device will be almost identical to the current model, with the exception of a 3G chipset to allow faster downloads. iPhones in new shapes and sizes, he expects, won’t come before January ‘09.
• A new OS. With the new iPhone will come a new operating system — OS X iPhone — that will open the device up to enterprise software and to all the 3rd party apps that have been under development since March.
• Focus on integration. Munster expects Jobs to spend a lot of time highlighting Apple’s “unique value proposition” of having Macs and iPhones running on the same operating system platform. “With control over the hardware and the software, Apple offers a uniquely integrated ecosystem of [consumer electronics] devices, which we believe is driving Mac sales, and vice versa.”
• New MacBooks. Given that it’s been two years since the MacBook was introduced and that the MacBook Pro is essentially the same design as the PowerBook G4 that came out 5.5 years ago, Munster believes there’s a 60% chance Jobs will introduce redesigned notebooks on June 9 and an 80% chance they will come this summer — in time for the back-to-school sales rush.

So when should iPhone buyers queue up? Like Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz, Munster believes that Apple is planning a worldwide release of the new phones in mid-June — not, as previously speculated, June 27 (opening day of Pixar’s Wall-E and the anniversary, almost to the day, of the first iPhone’s release).

But unlike Gizmodo, Munster gives a good business reason for Jobs to push up the date of release. In a note to clients dated May 16 he points out that a mid-June shipment — one month after the original iPhone was listed as unavailable on its Web site — would allow Apple to book the initial surge of 3G iPhones in the June quarter, making up for all the iPhone sales the company lost in May.

Here’s well-timed link from Andy Space at 9to5Mac.

With 19 days to go (according to my handy keynote widget) before Steve Jobs takes the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone West for Apple’s (AAPL) annual World Wide Developers Conference, Space has re-run a compilation of Apple keynote bloopers.

I’ve pasted the YouTube link below. Originally posted a year ago, it features cameos by marketing VP Phil Schiller (waiting in vain for a game to load) and Sony president Kunitake Ando (searching in vain for a word in English).

But the star, as usual, is Steve Jobs. See him wrestle in public — and keep his legendary temper mostly in check — as Macs crash, demos fail and a balky camera declines to yield to his command (and ends up getting hurled off stage).

There are worse ways to spend four minutes and forty seconds on a slow news day.

E-mail subscribers: click here.

UPDATE: Reader iSmashPhone from Philadelphia offers two helpful links: 1) Apple’s own compilation of  Jobs’ greatest hits and 2) communications coach Carmine Gallo’s instructional video that teaches busy executives how they, too, can learn to Present Like Steve Jobs.

[UPDATE: Apple made it official on Tuesday with this press release. Jobs' keynote is scheduled for 10 a.m. PT.]

Although no official announcement has been made, Apple public relations confirmed to Fortune that Steve Jobs will deliver a keynote address on June 9, the first day of the 2008 World Wide Developers conference.

It is widely expected that Jobs will use that speech to unveil the next generation of iPhones, including a so-called 3G model.

“The launch of the new model is imminent,” wrote Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in a report to clients Monday.

Munster notes that beginning Saturday, May 10, first generation iPhones were unavailable through Apple’s online store in the United States, the most recent sign that the company is clearing inventory in advance of a new release. (Two days earlier, O2 ran out of iPhones in the United Kingdom.) On Sunday Munster called 11 Apple retail stores to check on their supply; five were completely out of stock and one of the remaining six had fewer that five phones on hand.

Munster also alerted his clients to the discovery, first reported over the weekend by MacRumors, of a switch in the latest release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware that will allow users to toggle 3G data ON for faster download speeds or OFF to conserve battery life.

Despite dwindling supplies, Munster still estimates that Apple will ship 1.7 million iPhones in the quarter that ends June 30. That’s because he expects Apple to start shipping the new model in large numbers before the end of the month.

Other signs — including the release of the new Software Developers Kit scheduled for late June and an AT&T Mobile (T) memo canceling staff vacations between June 15 and July 12 (see here) — point to Friday, June 27, as the day the new model will go on sale. That would give Apple four days of 3G iPhone sales before the quarter closes.

“Net-net,” writes Munster, “the initial surge of iPhone sales in June would likely offset the lost sales due to limited availability in May.”

The drumroll has already started on Apple’s (AAPL) website, where users can download a Dashboard widget counting down the hours before the June 9 WWDC by the days, hours, minutes and seconds.