iPhone developers will be able to download the new firmware today, while the rest of us will have to wait until it is released to the public later this summer.

Overall, Apple will give developers access to over 1000 new APIs. Apple also announced that it sold 13.7 million iPhones in 2008, which is far more than the 10 million Apple itself had predicted.

New Homescreen

The new homescreen will be tightly integrated with the new universal search feature on the iPhone, which will allow you to search through your email, calendar, notes, and iPod library from one single interface. The new homescreen is basically Apple's iPhone version of Spotlight, as it allows you to find and start apps by searching for them.

Highlights

We detailed some of the most interesting additions to the new iPhone firmware below, but here is a summary of the highlights:

• copy and paste (just like Kevin Rose (and others) predicted)
• push notification
• P2P over Bluetooth
• MMS
• embeddable maps
• landscape mode for all Apple apps
• ability to send multiple photos
• tethering is supported by the phone, but carriers get to choose if they enable it
• no tablet

Copy and Paste

As usual, Apple kept some of the best things for last, but, as rumored, the iPhone will now get copy and paste functionality. Users simply have to double click a word, after which a dialog appears that allows you to cut, copy, or paste. A longer press will automatically mark a complete paragraph. If you paste in the wrong thing, you can simply shake the phone to undo your action.

MMS

Apple will also finally support MMS.

No Background Processes - But Push Notifcation is Finally Coming

In Apple's tests, background apps turned out to be a major battery drain, so Apple clearly decided against this. Using background processes, Apple argues that even just a standard IM client reduced the battery life by 80%, while the standby time of the phone only dropped by 23% with push notifications. There will be three types of notifications: badge, audio alerts, text alerts.

Apps that are already open will communicate directly with the third-party server, while closed apps will go through Apple's servers.

New and Better Apps: Calendar, Voice Memos, Stocks

The built-in Apple calendar app will now finally support the CalDAV standard. The stock tracker can now display relevant news stories right in the app, as well as new details like the highs and lows for the day.

Apple also introduced a new app which will record voice memos.

Subscriptions/In-App Purchasing

Besides the new APIs, the most exciting announcement for developers is surely that Apple will now give them the ability to sell subscriptions, extra game levels, and other add-ons from within their applications. Thanks to this, users will, for example, be able to buy a new Kindle book right from within the app, or new outfits for their Sims characters from within the game.

To us, this seems like a smart move, as it will create additional revenue streams for both Apple and the large contingent of iPhone developers.

Bluetooth P2P

Apple will also introduce peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth, which will, for example, allow game developers to easily create multiplayer games.

At the same time, however, Apple will also allow other third party accessories to communicate directly with the phone. Lifescan, for example, one of the apps that Apple demoed during the announcement, is an app for diabetes patients that can get glucose readings from a medical device and then calculate the necessary insulin doses.

Maps and Directions

Another highlight of the new iPhone firmware is the new Public Maps API, which makes it easy for developers to embed maps into their apps. Maybe even more interesting, Apple will also now allow developers to create GPS-enabled apps that can do turn-by-turn navigation. For licensing reasons, however, Apple's own map application will not feature this function.

APIs

Apple will introduce a large number of APIs in this new release. Among these are APIs for accessing the iPod library from other applications, streaming audio and video, as well as voice chat and a battery API. One interesting feature of the streaming video feature (and presumably also of the streaming audio API), is that it will adjust the video quality according to the connection speed.

One of the first applications to make use of all of this is Meebo's new native iPhone application, which was demoed during the announcement.

Send Multiple Photos

One feature that was always missing from the iPhone oddly was the ability to email more than one photo at a time. In the new version of the firmware, this has finally been rectified.

We would like to thank our friends at VentureBeat and Engadget for their great live coverage of the announcement!

As Freshbook's Sunir Shah rightly points out, an open source ecosystem can only thrive when enough developers decide to join the community. Right now, the open source iPhone apps that are available are quite good, but there are also very few of them. Apple itself puts too many road blocks in front of potential developers, which, as Shah argues, will lead most of these collaborative projects to develop web apps instead of native apps. However, given the limitations of the web apps platform compared to the native iPhone platform, these applications won't be able to really harness the power of these devices.

Android

For open source advocates, Apple's closed operating system is clearly no match for Google's Android, however. After all, Android not only makes open source collaboration easier by making the SDK available for free (Apple charges $99 Update: Apple makes the SDK available for free, but developers need to pay to get access all the other developer resources and a chance of inclusion in the App Store), but Google has even open sourced the operating system itself.

We hope that more developers will join these open source iPhone initiatives, but currently, Apple isn't exactly making things easy for developers. Even something as simple as giving an application out to a large group of beta testers is still cumbersome.

Opera's widgets will be able to run on the company's wildly popular mobile browser, Opera Mini excluded, the desktop version of Opera, the Nintendo Wii and any other devices that run Opera 9.5. We covered the launch of 9.5 here.

Opera differentiates itself by being highly standards compliant, cross platform and feature-rich. While not nearly as popular inside the US as it is internationally, the company's fans are many and outspoken.

Can freely developed and distributed widgets from Opera challenge the awesome wow-power of iPhone apps? As the initial shock of the iPhone interface wears off and an increasing number of rival handsets begin offering similar functionality, that may be possible. The delays in opening the iPhone App Store have already begun to frustrate developers, but the expected release of a 3G iPhone and a big subsidy driven price drop may extend Apple's lead by the time the App Store launches.

Below is a video released by Opera explaining the SDK. To see the video in greater detail click menu and select fullscreen.

The Developer Platform

The API for the phone, called Cocoa Touch, comes with an iPhone version of the same developer tools Apple offers Mac developers today. The Cocoa Touch toolkit will include the following, succinctly summarized by Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch: "Interface Builder, Instruments, and iPhone Simulator. Interface Builder lets you drag-n-drop an interface together for your new iPhone app. Instruments is a suite of performance analytics tools. And iPhone Simulator simulates the entire API stack of the iPhone letting you test an iPhone app from your Mac."

The announcement focused extensively on the location awareness capabilities the phone has and by all accounts developers are very excited to get their hands on it. Apple will open an iPhone App Store and take 30% of all transactions made there. Apps will not be allowed to be distributed in any other way. Mac developer and Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber talked to a variety of other developers today and has a good discussion about details from a developer perspective and how excited his community is.

Venture Capitalists Kleiner Perkins announced at the Apple event that they are launching a $100 million fund to finance companies developing applications for the iPhone.

Enterprise Ready

Apple's iPhone SDK has overshadowed a flurry of other mobile news this week, including the announcement that Nokia devices will carry Microsoft's Flash competitor Silverlight, but it's all just evidence that mobile really isn't dead. Quite far from it. You can follow the latest news and debates on issues like location awareness/privacy and user interface via the mobile resources in the RWW Toolkit for Key Topics in 2008.

Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog

In the meantime, Apple announced the other day it will release “the iPhone software roadmap” on March 6. Many around the Web believe this will be the much-anticipated software developer kit (SDK), although there is speculation that it might be just a roadmap and that the actual SDK won’t be released until later in the Spring.

No matter when it’s released, the SDK is important because it will allow third-party developers to write specific applications for the phone, essentially giving it a “new” feeling — let’s call this one iPhone 1.5.

Taken together, iPhone 1.5 and iPhone 2.0 bring the future into focus, propelling Apple toward its oft-stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of the year.

Third-party applications appeal to holdouts like the enterprise market who have been waiting for the additional functionality found on smartphones from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and Research in Motion (Blackberry), among others.

Another set of holdouts are those who want the faster data capabilities of 3G networks, which is important to the overseas market. Assuming iPhone 2.0 is released early enough to impact sales, Apple should hit its mark of selling 10 million iPhones by year-end.

Reading between the lines, Tim Cook, Apple’s COO, hinted at this timing. The iPhone is already an “incredible accomplishment,” he told the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium Wednesday, but it has far more potential in the long term (Cook’s presentation).

“I need a bigger word than ‘enormous’ to describe it,” he said.

This post is syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.

PaidContent's MocoNews points out that though Go "comes preloaded on some phones made by Motorola, LG, Samsung and Nokia, carriers in the United States strip the software from the phones."

In as much as handset manufacturers are open to platform-type innovation, and software vendors are obviously moving in this direction - it seems obvious that the foot-draggers are the telcom carriers. Their stranglehold over the mobile world seems in direct conflict with efforts to make the most of the mobile user experience - but telcoms are used to being the among the most hated companies on the planet.

To draw an analogy with major record labels and DRM - this is almost the opposite type of situation. The case for mobile openness seems to remain based in hopefulness more than a survival imperative for vendors faced with a market threat.

To draw another analogy - might this be comparable to Comcast telling Mozilla that it can't start Comcast customers who are Firefox users out on Google's search page, that it has to make a Comcast search page the default home page?

While telcom execs will likely get theirs in the afterlife, the rest of us will probably have to keep on wishing - unless 3rd party software becomes the only meaningful means of monetization and major revenue sharing comes about.