You have to hand it to Apple, they’ve got this buzz game down cold. They wait until the last possible second (almost 10 days out now) to announce a very substantial upgrade for the iPhone – they’ve nearly doubled the initial estimates for talk time for the device, from 5 hours to now 8 hours.

The first question is how on Earth did Apple manage to do this less than 2 weeks before the launch? I seems a certainty that they’ve known about this upgrade for a while and have been holding it back. Okay, so why not announce it at WWDC when the whole world is watching? The only thing I can think of is Mel Gibson in Braveheart when he’s in battle formation with his men screaming “HOLD!” as the English horses are charging at them. At the last possible second he shouts “NOW!” and his countrymen drop to the ground and pick up their long spears – their secret weapon – it’s too late for the English to stop their forward momentum. This battery upgrade is Apple’s secret weapon, and Steve Jobs has just executed it like William Wallace sans kilt.

Also noted in the release is that the iPhone will now feature up to 250 hours of standby time (over 10 days), 6 hours of Internet usage (this has gained an hour), 7 hours of video playback (this has gained 2 hours), and 24 hours of audio playback (up 8 hours). For every single one of these features this is obviously great news and given Apple’s little competitive chart at the bottom of the release would seem to easily trump all rivals.

Talk time is the single most important feature of a cell phone and Apple just added 3 hours of it – it’s simply huge. But perhaps bigger to me personally is the boost in video playback. If the iPhone really can play around 3 full feature length films before sputtering out – I think I’m sold.

Meanwhile Apple’s stock has shot up almost $5 a share on the news, so Wall Street clearly knows just how huge this news is.