Apple details iPhone 2.0 software

Early July update free for iPhoners, $10 for iPod touch owners

9 June 2008 19:17 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Features new to the iPhone 2.0 software have been revealed at today's Apple developer event and will be available to iPhone owners in early July.

As with the January software update, it will be free for the iPhone, but iPod touch owners will have to pay a $9.99 charge - although this is less than the $20 charged for the previous update.

Steve Jobs highlighted particular new functionality during his keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

This will include improved language support, especially Asian, contact search with live searching, the ability to save images received on the iPhone, a new calculator with scientific mode when you rotate the iPhone and the parental controls that were promised at MacWorld.

In addition, and of interest to business and enterprise users the iPhone 2.0 will offer full iWork document support as well as complete support for Office documents - Word, Excel, and now PowerPoint.

Enterprises can also distribute apps just to their employees by authorising iPhones within their enterprise and then create applications that just run on those phones, distributing just through their intranet.

More information about the practicalities of the App Store have also been revealed. Instead of the 22 countries the Store was due to be available in, Apple has extended the coverage to 62 countries - "almost anywhere in the world where there's an iPhone".

Applications of 10MB or less, will be available to be downloaded over cellular networks or Wi-Fi - as well as iTunes - or apps over 10MB in size will be Wi-Fi or iTunes only.