Steve Jobs and Apple officially announced the new iPhone 3G today set to ship July 11, Shortly after the 2nd version of the popular mobile handset appeared on the Apple Store giving some long-awaited answers and putting many rumors to bed about the changes to the iPhone.

Lots of applications and lots of games were highlights of the presentation today for the iPhone, showing off what can be done and what has been done with the iPhone SDK. Also included in this model is GPS mapping, support for more business-centric applications like Microsoft Exchange and of course the faster 3G wireless connection. Based on these features it’s very apparent that Apple was listening to requests and complaints after the launch of the original iPhone. Major issues like a maps with no GPS and an internet browser with too slow of a connection to use are no longer, or at least much less of an issue.

Today at WWDC Steve Jobs made the official announcement we’ve been waiting for - the 3G iPhone. For the most part the new model looks very similar to the original, but along with the high speed connection Apple did add in some other improvements.

Some of the new features highlighted today include a full plastic back, improved audio, a flush headphone jack, even thinner edges, solid metal buttons, GPS and all of this for a $199 price tag for the 8GB model. Apple is boasting that with the new 3G connection web pages load 2.8 times faster than the previous iPhone model and is faster than both the Nokia N95 and the Treo 750. The battery is expected to give 5-6 hours of web browsing, 8-10 hours of talk time (5 hours of 3G talk) and 24 hours of audio playback on a single charge.

The Application Store is coming in July. It’s chock full of applications too. Here’s a brief rundown. eBay has an auction application for the iPhone—available from the store for free. Loopt is an application that uses CoreLocation services to find people near you, you stalker. A dedicated TypePad client will be available for free. How about the AP delivering a news channel, that can handle photos, news, and video from the AP network. Mow Cow is a music application that allows you to have a band in your pocket, just be careful where you play. Major League Baseball even got in on the act with a baseball app for stats, results, and video. Modality will let you see anatomical images and really zoom in for some queasy fun. And that’s not a complete list either.

Good news for those who want more games on the iPhone. Super Monkey Ball has 110 stages and your choice of four monkeys. They showed a quick run-through during the keynote, and it looks like the graphics are superior to anything else on the phone. Pangea also demoed some games, like Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally, where you can use the iPhone as the steering wheel. Some are describing the games as having very nice high-quality graphics, and being “totally playable”. Digital Legends was also on hand and demoed a God of War-type game that only took two weeks to develop. That one supposedly has graphics that fall between the DS and PSP. Expect that one in September.

Is Apple getting into solar power? It looks that way. According to Tradethenews.com, the company filed a patent involving placing solar cells on portable devices. This means that Apple’s iPhone or other devices could have photovoltaic cells stacked underneath LCD touch screens, which maximizes the area available for harnessing and soaking up the power of the sun.

According to the filing, performance info in regard to the performance of a device’s solar cells could be displayed on the main screen next to battery power, which makes sense. It could also appear on top of the actual cells, which could be displaying the Apple logo. Imagine less charging of devices. Then one day no charging at all. Nice.

Apple has put out an official announcement that Steve Jobs and a number of other suits from Apple will be kicking off the Worldwide Developers Conference this year in San Francisco. The press release says that this years conference will showcase both the OS X Leopard and the OS X iPhone, but we’re thinking there will be a new iPhone announcement, too.

The event meets the expected timeline for the launch of the 3G iPhone, the UK has run out of iPhone stock and we wouldn’t believe that Jobs would launch the 3G version overseas before launching it stateside first. WWDC 2008 runs for five days from June 9th to June 13th with the keynote from Jobs and crew on the 9th starting at 10am; we’ll be listening.

We had already seen some iPhone price cuts overseas for what many felt was to help clear out the non-3G inventory of phones in Europe, but now it appears that O2 has complete run out of stock with the 8GB and 16GB iPhones. We’ve still seen no official word on the release date, price or specs of a 3G iPhone but we can’t imagine it could be far off now that the inventory in the UK is depleted.

O2

Apple has recently announced the beta release of the 5th version of the iPhone SDK, which contains the framework, tools and compilers for making your own custom applications for Apple’s iPhone operating system. It provides also provides a simulator to run your apps on, which represents both the iPhone and the iPod touch. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of changes to this kit other than bringing it up to the latest OS version, but the download is free and there’s no sense working with the older version.

iPhone Developers

Good news for more Apple fans around the world as Vodafone announced today that it has made an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to ten new markets sometime yet this year. Vodafone says it will offer the iPhone to its customers for purchase and use on the Vodafone network in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.

Vodafone

We’ve all seen our share of fake knock-offs, especially with the iPhone. Some are just straight clone attempts, while others are a bit strange. This one is just plain F@%#ing weird. The Toggolino Phone shames itself quite nicely, right there in the packaging.

Apparently the device comes packaged with a German kit that teaches German rugrats how to associate words with animals or…something. You could very well be looking at the next Speak and Spell toy. Looks pretty fun actually.

Goldstriker knows a thing or two about making devices more beautiful, the iPhone is no exception and the Solar Star edition is their latest attempt. It features 24 carat gold plating on both the front bezel and Apple’s rear logo, while the rest of the case is the ultra luxurious Balloon White paint found on a Lamborghini Gallardo.

The white-and-gold color scheme is sex to the eye and looks nice to touch. It comes with updated firmware 1.1.4 and is unlocked for worldwide GSM use. You’ll get 16GB of flash memory inside. The $1,477 price tag is not for everyone. Some of us would rather save the money for a 3G iPhone, despite how beautiful this one looks.

It’s hard to say how they did it, but it appears that somehow Telecom Italia Mobile has convinced Apple and Steve Jobs to offer the new upcoming 3G version of the iPhone to customers in Italy with quite a bit more leeway than we’ve seen here in the states. Not only will the iPhone not require that two-year service contract along with the purchase, but it will also come unlocked.

This is something that Apple has been very stringent about stateside and has been volleying versions with hackers since the beginning, keeping the iPhone locked and with a single, exclusive carrier. What this means is that in Italy customers can just by the iPhone and use it with any carrier that they choose.

In anticipation of a new iPhone model coming to Germany, T-Mobile has drastically slashed the price of the existing 8GB model from €399 to just €99 for German customers. This lower price equates to approximately $155 USD, where the 8GB iPhone is currently going for $399 with a 2 year contract in the United States.

The €99 iPhone is being offered for a limited time from April 7 through June 30 and comes with a 2 year plan for 89 euros a month. The 16GB model price appears to remain untouched with a price of €499. Apple has been rumored to have a new, faster 3G version of the iPhone in the works and this promotion may be a way to unload some of the older models prior to the launch. Alternatively it could also just be a promotion for Apple and T-Mobile to unload some of their inventory due to poor sales of the iPhone in the area due to the heavy competition of mobile handsets that are 3G enabled.

I really like my iPhone, but man I have a really hard time typing on the phone because the keys are so small. On more than one occasion I have wished for a nice pointy stylus to use for navigation and typing. The problem is that the touch screen is capacitive so it only works with a finger—or does it?

ThinkGeek has a sweet iPhone stylus from Pogo that promises to work with the iPhone. It uses some sort of felt like material on the end that fools the touch screen into thinking your finger is pressing the buttons. The Pogo for iPhone also works with the iPod touch.

Within just 4 days of Apple releasing a beta version of the software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone, the company claims they’ve already had an incredibly positive response with over 100,000 downloads. This is good news for iPhone owners since there will likely be more useful and fun applications available for the iPhone soon from third party developers.

Multiple development shops have already announced plans to offer applications for the iPhone with Gameloft being one of the most hyped with 15 games planned for the iPhone yet this year. Unfortunately, even though the SDK is out and Gameloft can get these games ready quickly, they won’t be available for download until the App Store opens in June.