The Unstoppable Apple iPhone 2.0

Millions of Apple iPhone owners around the world, including (cough, cough) yours truly, are ecstatic about the handset’s major software update coming this June. The new features will introduce more business features and will have a broader support for the much loved third party apps. (in picture below: Steve Jobs [co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple] unveils the power of the iPhone version 2.0)

Apple is already finishing up on the enhancements of the software. They had taken to account the requests from customers of both the business and consumer worlds – and now they are finally letting third party app developers create more freely to bring more stable games, utilities, and other useful apps to the iPhone.

From the looks of things, the incoming changes will prove to drastically transform the way iPhone users experience the handset. Much of these developments were made possible with the introduction of the new development kit.

One of the flaws of the current version — that surfaced as early as its release – was exposed by the business class consumers. Most of them argued that the iPhone was generally not for the business minded user. The phone was lacking networking and security tools. The most obvious flaw: the phone did not support the widely used Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol which office workers use around the workplace for correspondence, meetings, schedules and a whole lot more.

Although it had that huge chink in its armor, the iPhone’s innovative design and its promise of unlimited applications proved to be enough to keep the businessman interested with the handset. And now the wait is over.

The new version 2.0 Apple iPhone will have built-in Exchange ActiveSync – totally revising the current iPhone’s e-mail and calendar apps. Setup will be similar to the current version, except that Microsoft Exchange will be added to the list of e-mail clients (pictured above: a screenshot from Engadget show the setup process). Just copy the settings of your PC or laptop and you are ready to go. With the new version, the user can configure his corporate e-mail with just a few waves of the finger – without the help of his or her company’s IT technician.

Aside from the company e-mail server support, Apple also added Cisco IPsec VPN support for those whose job requires a lot of moving around outside the confines of the office. VPN will let the user access files and other data stored on the company server directly from their handset. This will not be as easy to setup, though; but the difficulty of going through initial setup will be nothing compared to the benefits of having data access from outside the office.

Aside from the business minded upgrades, current users and future normal use consumers will benefit much from the Apple iPhone software development kit (SDK) – which gives programmers the basic tools they need to write native software from within the iPhone itself. Much of the widely used (and really ultimately very useful) third party apps developed for the current version are simple ports of web apps.

The SDK tools will let programmers take control of the touch screen and the accelerometer (the tilting sensor) to name a few – can you imagine all the possible apps, much more, games programmers can think of with total control of the accelerometer tool?

Moreover, access to these software will be available directly from the iTunes app. The newly introduced iTunes App Store will let users download developed apps directly from Apple.