iPhone users and iPhone developers alike jumped for joy yesterday when Apple announced the iPhone SDK. Apple also previewed its iPhone 2.0 software that is scheduled to release this June. Enterprise customers can register for the iPhone 2.0 software beta right now as well.

According to Apple the iPhone 2.0 software adds some significant features for enterprise users including support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync that provides secure over-the-air push email, contacts, and calendars. Several mail features will be added to the iPhone with the 2.0 update including the ability to view PowerPoint attachments along with Word and Excel. One feature that I have longed for is on the feature list as well, the ability to mass delete and move emails. Too bad Apple didn’t add the ability to mark emails as read in mass.

Today Apple announced the release of a new 16GB iPhone giving double the storage capacity in the device. The Apple store was down for a while this morning, just in the U.S., which especially on a Tuesday indicates the company had something new coming. When the site came back up the Apple store now shows two models, one with the original 8GB capacity for $399 and a new 16GB iPhone model for $499. All the specs aside from the increased storage capacity appear to be the same, and no, there was no 3G added into the 16GB model.

In addition to the iPhone getting some more storage, the iPod touch also saw an increase in its capacity to store music, pictures and video with Apple also announcing a 32GB version today as well. The 32GB iPod touch was added to the Apple store this morning retailing for $499, along with the existing 16GB model priced at $399 and the 8GB model going for $299.

This morning the Apple Store was down for a little while which usually means they’re bringing on some new stuff. When it came back up we noticed a new Pink iPod nano as the latest addition in the lineup of the 3rd generation players. The new pink model is an 8GB version (4GB only comes in silver) and retails the same as the other 8GB models for $199. Apple is also offering two lines of free engraving on the back and 24 hours shipping so you can get your pink iPod in plenty of time for Valentines day.

Apple seems intent on bringing the iPhone to Asia yet this year and Advanced Info Service (AIS) in Thailand is the latest to announce that they are in negotiations to bring the popular mobile handset in their direction. Apple has recently been in negotiations with NTT Docomo in Japan with revenue sharing being a pivotal point in negotiations. China Mobile had also been in talks about carrying the iPhone until recently when the issue of revenue sharing with Apple brought the discussions to a halt.

According to AIS chief marketing officer Sanchai Thiewprasertkul, Apple is likely to find difficulty in negotiating a revenue sharing deal in Thailand as well. AIS charges only a Thai baht (about 3 cents) per minute for airtime on their plans, and around 90% of the plans are prepaid. Apple would have trouble making revenue by trying to split 3 cents per minute and is looking to do so with post-paid plans.

In the keynote speech yesterday at MacWorld Jobs brushed over the MacBook Air SuperDrive fairly quickly giving the message that the need for optical drives are becoming less, especially since the new MacBook Air has no internal optical drive. According to Apple it can download what software it needs through the internet and connect wirelessly to the Time Capsule for backing up and storing data. Apple does know that the end of optical drives is still a ways off and created this MacBook Air SuperDrive as an external optical drive accessory to the MacBook Air, and ONLY for the MacBook Air according to the specs.

It connects and is powered through a single standard USB cable that’s built into the drive so the MacBook Air will power the SuperDrive both when plugged in and when on batteries. The slot-loading SuperDrive is not much bigger than a CD case at 5.47 x 5.47 x 0.67 inches, and weighs 1.09 pounds. It also has some decent speeds with writing CD-Rs at 24x and double-layer DVDs at 4x.

Amidst the new product announcements unveiled during the MacWorld 2008 keynote today Jobs slipped in a message about a new feature that will easily get your DVD content into your iTunes or Windows Media Player library called Digital Copy. Partnering with Twentieth Century Fox, Apple is offering the Digital Copy feature on DVDs from the Fox studio starting with “Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest” which releases today.

Anytime someone purchases a DVD from Fox that has the Digital Copy feature they can insert the disc into their computer, enter a unique code and transfer the movie into iTunes or Windows Media Player. The movie will then be available for unlimited viewing on their computer, iPod with video, iPhone, Apple TV or other video media player. There is of course some restriction on your purchased DVD’s Digital Copy feature however. It will transfer the DVD to only one instance of iTunes, limited by the unique code required.

Apple announced the immediate launch of iTunes Movie Rentals today during the MacWorld 2008 keynote speech, allowing iTunes users to get limited-time download of movies from any of the major studios for as little as $2.99. The new service is part of iTunes version 7.6 which is available now and gives a rental download of movies for 30 days, but once you begin watching the movie the rental will run out in 24 hours. It can be watched as many times as you would like within that time. You can even start watching on your computer and then transfer the video to your iPod and finish watching the movie on the go.

Apple appears to have picked up all the major studios with this offer with the list of participants including 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Lionsgate and New Line Cinema. iTunes plans to have over 1,000 titles available by the end of February with rates of $2.99 for regular titles and $3.99 for new releases. For another dollar iTunes will deliver titles in high-def with Dolby 5.1 surround.

As part of the announcements at the MacWorld keynote speech today, Steve Jobs introduced the new Apple Time Capsule – a appliance designed to help facilitate wireless, automatic data backups from all the Macs in your home. The device works with machines running the Leopard OS along with the Time Machine software to automatically create back ups of everything on your Mac computer, hourly if you would prefer, and from multiple different Macs.

The Time Capsule coincides well with the launch of the MacBook Air since one of the common needs for an optical drive is to back up data. Since the Air doesn’t have an internal CD or DVD drive the Time Capsule makes a nice solution to provide wireless data backups to the notebook. The integrated software lets users look through history for lost files or even restore the system to a previous point in time.

It looks like those MacBook Air rumors were really not too far off. Today Steve Jobs announced the latest addition to the MacBook lineup at MacWorld in San Francisco, touting it as the thinnest notebook in the world. The MacBook Air measures a mere 0.16 inches at its thinnest point, and it only gets as thick as 0.76 inches at the hinged end.

The Air Mac will start shipping in about two weeks with a retail price of $1,799, and comes with the following features:

Even though Apple’s MacWorld is only a week away we wouldn’t expect Jobs and company to just stay quiet during the whole week of CES, patiently waiting for their time. Today Apple unveiled the new Mac Pro and the Xserve both with the ability to be powered by up to 8 processor cores.

The Mac Pro houses two of Intel’s 45nm Quad-Core Xeon processors at up to 3.2GHz giving it twice the power of the prior model. It comes packing a 1600MHz front-side bus and as much as 32GB of 800MHz memory, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB, dual gigabit Ethernet and 4 available HDD bays that combined can bring 4TB of storage to the new Mac Pro. Also, the number eight is most significant here with processor cores but it’s also the number of 30-inch monitors that can be driven by the computer.

According to the Financial Times, Apple is finally getting ready to announce a deal with Twentieth Century Fox to offer Fox movies available for download through iTunes. The service would allow users to download Fox movies as a temporary digital “rental”. According to the source Fox is also working out a feature on their physical DVD movies that would let DVD owners temporarily transfer the movie content from the DVD to a digital player like an iPod or a computer using Apple’s DRM.

This is something that Apple has been trying to get going for a while but has met some resistance with most studios, likely for fear of losing sales due to a higher piracy rate of movies and lower costs of ownership. Another issue is the threat that this poses to video on demand services from places such as Comcast and DirectTV. Apple currently sells some movie titles on iTunes from Disney and Viacom but has not had as much luck getting the ball rolling with video as it has with online music purchases, which more that likely has led to a rental offering.

Apple has a new patent application in the European Patent Office that details out a new volume control feature to help prevent hearing loss when listening to an iPod. People that have messed around with the settings on an iPod have likely already noticed that you can already set the maximum volume for your iPod to avoid an inadvertent blasts of sound that could damage your ear. The new feature would be available in iPods and the iPhone and would take into account not only how loud the volume is while your listening, but also how long you’ve been listening to decide when the listener may have had enough.

According to the Wall Street Journal Steve Jobs has been in talks with Masao Nakamura, president of NTT DoCoMo, about launching the iPhone in Japan next. The iPhone has already made its launch overseas in the UK, Germany and France and could soon be trying its hand at one of the largest markets for mobile phones in the world.

The report says that Jobs is in talks wtih Softbank Corp. in Japan as well who could also have a shot at carrying the iPhone in Japan and of course makes some friendly competition for Jobs to deal between on an exclusive contract. If Apple ends up partnering with NTT DoCoMo, could this spark the launch of the 3G iPhone?

If you were looking to take advantage of, or get taken advantage of depending on how you look at it, the very expensive deal T-Mobile was offering for unlocked iPhones in Germany you’re now too late. A German court has ruled that T-Mobile can indeed be the exclusive operator for Apple’s popular handset in Germany by ruling against a complaint filed by Vodafone.

Apple had planned to launch the iPhone in Germany with T-Mobile being the exclusive carrier much as it did in the United States, however Vodafone filed a complaint stating that the exclusivity went against German laws to protect consumers. The complaint resulted in a temporary injunction against T-Mobile requiring them to offer the iPhones unlocked and able to connect to other operators including Vodafone. T-Mobile complied with the injunction but offered the normally $580 iPhone in an unlocked state for $1460. Despite the high price Klaus Czerwinski of T-Mobile told ZDNet UK that there were still “many sold.”

At an event dinner in California on Wednesday AT&T Chief executive Randall Stephenson said that consumers could expect the iPhone to be available on a 3G network as soon as next year. This change would solve one of the major complaints many have of the iPhone with its currently slower EDGE network.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has said in the past that the iPhone didn’t initially launch on the 3G network due to the restrictions the faster network put on the battery life of the phone. He also stated that the 3G capabilities may be available by late 2008, so this news in general isn’t too much of a surprise.