To a booming applause Steve Jobs unveiled the long awaited iPhone 2.0 at WWDC 2008.

As expected it is now 3G, has GPS support, the App Store for downloading applications and games over the air. Among the examples on Apple's site there's a Twitter client poking out. They must know something we don't, as an army of tweeting iPhone users isn't going to help Twitter's currently overloaded state.

To keep the corporates happy, enterprise support for Microsoft Exchange via ActiveSync. For non Exchange users who want to keep up to date, there's MobileMe, which promises to keep calendars, contacts, etc all nicely synced across devices. It doesn't look like there's any SyncML support but given the conflict with MobileMe that's hardly a great surprise. I hope I'm wrong.

The headphone jack is no longer a headache, and you can use any standard 3.5mm headphones directly with the iPhone 2.0. Good thing as the sound quality has been much improved. The unit is also thinner, has metal buttons, a black plastic back and somewhat more oomph from the battery.

Extremely welcome was the fact they've knocked the price from the speculated $399 to a much more affordable $199 (USD). With that and the fact they're allowing iPhone 1.0 owners to upgrade the phone software, it would be fair to guess Apple are trying to get enough market penetration to head off the impending arrival of Google Android based phones.

Alas as it's not out until July we won't know if one can perform the same jailbreak tricks. We've waited this long so what's another month? ;)

Rather than focus on esoteric localisations, minor installer improvements, etc, it really is the time to bring it all together and focus on the herd of elephants gathered in the room.

Yes, it's those old nagging deficiencies that stop Thunderbird getting out into the business world, namely suitability as an Outlook and Exchange replacement. The way I see it, there are some excellent open source projects that should be pooling their talents with the Mozilla teams, and our little open source e-mail nirvana can become real. Here are my suggestions...

Talk to the Funambol SyncML team. Better still, hire the Mozilla SyncML plugin developer and give him some helpers! The combo works great to get data to phones and PDAs with SyncML support. My Nokia works fantastically well with it.

Talk to the OpenChange developers and put some energy into a Thunderbird plugin for their LibMAPI code. This takes care of Exchange integration by allowing something more than just POP3/IMAP access.

Without this barrier, and thus Thunderbird getting used at work, we chop the legs out from under the "Well I use Outlook at work so I'll use it at home" argument, and once office workers start using it they'll realise how nice and easy it is to get on with.

Talk to the Inverse team about SoGo. It's groupware with a web frontend that walks and talks like Thunderbird. It, or something like it that one can tack in front of standard IMAP, CalDAV and LDAP servers is the plug to the Outlook Web Access hole!

I've been asked many times by Outlook and OE defectors about this first one! The profile manager needs a makeover. Give Thunderbird password protected profiles, an easy (toolbar button & menu) to use within Thunderbird. There needs to be an easy way to switch between them, and make certain folders shareable between profiles or at least copyable, so mail can be easily moved.

Sort out the one way LDAP issue. It has great value in corporate environments. Along with that, make it easy to set up OpenLDAP. A point and click Win32/MacOS port wouldn't go amiss either.

Give the Lightning and Sunbird developers more help! 0.7 is really good. Certain key things are needed to make it better...

1. Focus hard on the sharing. Businesses want selective sharing of calendars / events through a centrally accessible system. The CalDAV servers around need to have a Win32/Mac point & click install, and the Linux version needs to just go in via package management. Don't make compilation the only way.
2. Get the URL handling working so that Firefox (or any other browser) will hand webcal, etc URLs to TB / Lightning.

MaximumPC have added to the 'Year of the Linux Desktop' articles in circulation. Having seen this story nearly every year I'm pessimistic, but perhaps a little less so with the rise of user friendly distributions such as Ubuntu, and the Vista situation.

"When Evans Data released its survey on Tuesday showing a sharp shift toward Linux (and away from Windows) among developers in North America, the Linux world went wild. Wistful pengiun heads heralded the coming Open Source Age. But the real measure of OS success is in the number of users, not the number of developers. After all, most of the world's PCs end up in the hands of ordinary people who have no interest in coding. Fortunately for open-source addicts, there are several signs that the coming year could bring a sea-change among end users, making 2008 the year of the Linux desktop."

Full article at MaximumPC

I had a chance to play on the new iPhone yesterday.

It's a pretty nifty little thing. The interface is clean and intuitive and the way it rotates the display based on how you're holding it is great. The lack a SIM prevented me from trying to call out on it but the phone interface is very nice.

It acts just like an iPod when docked. When playing a song, it shows the artist art using the whole view. Video plays back well too, and grabbing the latest useless tosh from YouTube is now very easy. The few photos I copied to Aperture were reasonably good in comparison to any other camera phone.

The embedded version of Safari worked in as much as I could see while offline, and e-mail looked to be quite functional, with options for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP auth. There was an Exchange option though it was really just a pointer to say IMAP capability needed to be set up, or that was how it seemed in my limited testing.

Size-wise it was definitely easy to keep in your pocket, felt quite sturdy, and after dozens of other customers presumably having given it a fondle since opening, it was devoid of scratches or any other damage.

I also gave the Apple TV a good going over. The interface is sharp, though video quality does show through and YouTube stuff is therefore understandably blocky. Music, podcasts and photos were easily accessed and played back as one would expect. All quite reasonable stuff. I was very tempted by the Apple TV just because I know it's hackable to play back DivX, etc and I really would like a nice living-room based player.

• iPhone - thumbs up for as much of it as I could test. Price is a factor at $600!
• Apple TV - some vids look very blocky but overall it's very polished. $299.