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Tonight Apple will produce its first-ever live event streamed to the iPhone: a concert by the electronica band Underworld. Apple has apparently kept the event quiet as it doesn’t want to overwhelm the AT&T network, but if you have an iPhone you can queue it up yourself at iphone.akamai.com orunderworldlive.com. The show starts at 9 p.m. PT and the stream is free.

Read the full details over at NewTeeVee ?

Former Apple Board of Directors member and current Google CEO Eric Schmidt wasn’t paid for his time at Cupertino. This despite Apple’s habitual practice of offering stock options and a $50,000 retainer to Board members, both of which Schmidt declined during his tenure.

Instead, like other board members, Schmidt settled for some awesome Apple gear in exchange for his contribution to the board. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and BusinessWeek, the Google CEO accepted $8,712 worth of goods, though no specific breakdown of what sort of hardware that number actually represents has been reported.

We do know that board members are entitled to one of each new Apple product released while they’re an active member, and that they receive additional hardware discounts over and above that. Thanks to this sweet deal, Al Gore took home $13,161 and Arthur Levinson $8,923. I’ll bet a hefty portion of those numbers actually accounts for Apple’s ridiculously over-priced customization options.

Apple board members are also allowed up to 30,000 of company stock, with an option to buy up to 10,000 more per year. Schmidt passed up the opportunity, however, choosing instead to buy 10,000 shares on the open market with his own money in 2006.

Schmidt also received a mystery “commemorative gift” valued at $7,580. Many other Apple execs received similar gifts, including COO Tim Cook, but details about what exactly was gifted remain unknown. A MacBook Pro with the Apple logo on the lid replaced with an etched likeness of the giftee’s face, perhaps? Whatever it was, I’m fairly sure I want one.

Turning down the lucrative extras that come along with being a high-ranked tech executive has become Schmidt’s M.O., so it’s not really surprising to find that he was working at Apple for comped hardware. At Google, he famously only receives a $1 per year salary, and in recent years has been turning down stock option perks from the search giant as well.

If nothing else, the FTC’s investigation into the close links between Apple and Google should pull back the curtain and provide more revelatory looks into the inner workings of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest players. Schmidt recently stepped down from the Apple board amid accusations that the two companies were too closely involved with one another, and involved in a relationship that could potentially be construed as a non-competitive arrangement. Google and Apple still share a common board member, however, as Arthur Levinson, former CEO of Genentech, is still a sitting member of both.

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Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes the rumored Apple tablet will be much more than a lifestyle product for the presbyopic generation. Instead, Munster expects as many as two million tablets could be sold in 2010, generating an estimated 1.2 billion in revenue.

Via Apple 2.0, Munster’s latest research also predicts a 2010 release. “Last week we spoke with an Asian component supplier that has received orders from Apple for a touch-screen device to be fulfilled by late CY09.” While this supports earlier reports, the most recent suggested timeframe is 2009.

As for the tablet itself, as the mock-up suggests, Munster apparently believes a giant iPod touch is in the offing. The tablet will be designed for media consumption, web surfing, and text tasks, like simple email. Pricing is expected to be in the $500 to $700 range, considerably less than previous estimates of $800. The tablet will likely have a 3G data plan, possibly subsidized, carriers being AT&T or Verizon. All this makes Munster bullish on the tablet, “While at first glance this may appear to address a niche market, we believe the addressable market is larger than that of the Apple TV, of which Apple sold about 1.2m in its first year.”

And this is where we stop the prediction train and get off. That last bit about 1.2 million Apple TVs being sold is, like much of this research note, speculation. Sales numbers for the Apple TV have never been released (not a good sign). The only official commentary on sales came during the first quarter conference call this year when Tim Cook stated that “unit sales were up over three times versus the year-ago quarter.” Three times what has never been established.

However, a comparison to the Apple TV is relevant to the tablet as a cautionary tale. Sadly, by refusing to add a DVD player or streaming options from services like Netflix and Hulu, the Apple TV languishes as nothing more than extension of the iTunes Store in the living room. If the Apple tablet turns out to be a giant iPod touch — hopefully better looking that that horrid mock-up — it risks being nothing more than extension of the App Store. That’s not as bad as the Apple TV, but the tablet could do better.

One rumor we have not heard anything about is whether the tablet will allow a Bluetooth keyboard. If so, an entire category of functionality would be added, from emails of more than a few sentences to papers and reports pages long. In your hand it’s a tablet, in a stand it’s a word processor. While there could be a risk of cannibalizing MacBook sales, it seems small. Assuming the tablet runs iPhone OS, the current limitations of the operating system would ensure the safety of MacBook sales.

The question whether the Apple tablet will truly be an alternative to the netbook or a giant iPod touch will likely be answered soon. One can only hope the reply can be typed.

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With the introduction of Push Notification Services, I envisaged a world of iPhone apps that would deliver countless valuable updates as they occurred. Of course, that’s precisely what hasn’t happened. Few of the apps available in the App Store actually make use of PNS, and those that do are of dubious value. (For example, Ambiance pushes notification of new sounds added to its library. Useful? No, not particularly.)

I also imagined we’d have Push notifications in our Twitter clients by now (Atebits, I’m looking at you!) because knowing what my fellow geeks are doing right now on the other side of the world is crucially important to me. I know you understand.

One Twitter app that’s leading the way with PNS is SimplyTweet 2.0. It’s Yet Another Twitter Client, sure, but it has an impressive feature set and its developer, Hwee-Boon Yar, sat down to answer some questions about the app, including telling me what it’s like developing for the iPhone as well as sharing his experiences of being on the receiving end of Apple’s broken application approval process.

Hwee-Boon, 31, lives in sunny Singapore where he owns and runs MotionObj, a company dedicated to iPhone software development. I wanted to know why he created Yet Another Twitter Client.

“I had used the iPhone for about a year and when the App Store was announced I thought, why not give it a try? I already had a Twitter account for some time but there weren’t any Twitter clients that met my needs -– in fact, I think there were only about three Twitter apps back then.

I already knew Smalltalk and C, and the toolset and languages for developing iPhone applications is based heavily on those language. So I thought a Twitter client would be an easy way to learn the tools and to build a business on, especially since I preferred not to work for anyone else. That was the start of the App Store Gold Rush period, and I was very naive.”

There has been an explosion in Twitter clients in the last year. Isn’t the market too saturated to bring anything meaningful to the table?

“When I started, there was only a few Twitter clients, but I could see the numbers growing. I joked that Twitter apps are the new flashlights in the App Store. But Twitter clients are one of those wonderful applications that can be treated in many different ways. Some applications do very well with a clean user interface and basic functionality, some applications strive to have tons of functionality. Occasionally one will appear that tries to do something innovative.

My aim is to keep SimplyTweet’s interface simple and usable but at the same time add and enhance features, such as conversation threading, push notifications, themes and photo searching.”

Bringing together the various APIs and having them all play nicely together must have been taxing; you presumably had to combine Twitter’s API, the iPhone SDK/Frameworks and interoperability with Apple’s PNS Servers. In the words of Marge Simpson, this sounds like a hassle coupled with a burden.

“The iPhone application itself makes use of Apple’s iPhone SDK, and there are occasional bugs in there, quirks that have to be worked around. Some of the functionality used in Apple’s built-in applications [in the iPhone OS] are not made available to developers. For example, I spent a day building the trash can animation effect similar to how the trash can button in Mail animates when you delete an email –- all because that element is not made available to developers for use in their own apps. But these problems are not uncommon to most platforms.

Interfacing with Twitter can pose problems. Sometimes they make a change that requires the code in the SimplyTweet application to be updated. Here’s where the real problem is. Twitter is kind enough to give sufficient lead time for developers to make changes, usually around five days. This works when you have full publishing control over your application. Unfortunately, with the App Store, even if you make a change and immediately submit the new update, there is no guarantee it will be approved within five days. I have waited weeks, sometimes only to have an update rejected; [I] worked out a fix, then had it rejected again. Each re-submission puts you at the back of the queue again.”

So while day-to-day iPhone software development is built on rock-solid foundations, the complaints we’ve been hearing about Apple’s approval process are valid? Is the process really broken?

“In short, it’s a mess. Approvals are unpredictable and payment is hard to track. Plus we can’t charge for upgrades, but for many software developers, upgrades are a major source of income.”

Including SimplyTweet?

“SimplyTweet has been relatively unknown for a long time, but it has actually undergone more than eight upgrades. All of those were free. But making updates can often take a lot of time and currently, there is no way a developer can make money from them. Add to this the hits-based nature of the App Store and you find developers are not so keen to do upgrades. The App Store apps are relatively cheap compared to what’s available on other mobile platforms, which is great for iPhone customers, but it doesn’t foster a healthy developer ecosystem.”

Hwee-Boon thinks that this low-cost, short-run revenue model will cause the quality of applications to drop and ultimately hurt both developers and users. It’s hard to disagree. We’ve all seen apps repackaged with “Pro” suffixes to justify charging customers afresh for what is, essentially, an upgrade to an existing app. (I invite you to add your own examples of such Apps in the comments.)

So why continue to develop for the iPhone when the outcome remains so bleak?

“Despite major issues with the App store, the iPhone is still the best mobile platform at the moment. Only at the moment.”

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