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

Apple sent out invitations to reports this week for press announcement concerning the details of the iPhone SDK. Jobs said it would happen in February and the date is set for next week on March 6 which we’ll call close enough. The expected information will allow developers to create third party applications that will run on the iPhone and the iPod touch, ridding the need for the hack and fix battle that Apple has been dealing with this past year.

In case you’re keeping track of that latest open source development platform for mobile devices called Android , the team just released an updated version based on all the great feedback they’ve received from the early releases of the platform. This latest release got the snappy name of m5-rc14, which I guess seems fitting for a platform named Android.

This version has a UI that is still a work in progress but received a significant update. Also new is the addition of layout animations, new media codecs to support 6 new audio file formats, an improvements to the Eclipse plugin and classes for geo-coding that will let you go both ways, (address to coordinate and coordinate to address for you pervs).

This morning Google had a phone open phone conference and made the much anticipated announcement that they along with 33 other companies are starting the Open Handset Alliance. The first and main project of the newly formed alliance is called Android, an open development platform for mobile handsets. The ultimate goal for Google with this is to overall make a better, more usable phone with more features where consumers will benefit, and of course to show advertisements on it where Google will also benefit.

Eric Schmidt was present on the call leading things off, with a number of other captains of industry including Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm, Peter Chou from HTC and Ed Zander from Motorola. The members of the Open Handset Alliance include some big names like Google, HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sprint, T-Mobile, eBay, Intel, NVIDIA and many others. Some notable big names we’re not seeing on the member list are Microsoft, Apple, AT&T and Verizon.