2. iPhone and iPod Touch Updates

Jobs’ second major announcement will likely be met with mixed feelings from the Apple faithful: There will be a major software update to the iPhone and iPod Touch, but the much hoped for iPhone hardware upgrade to the ATT 3G high speed wireless network was not announced.

Jobs began by discussing iPhone sales, which have been remarkable. There have been an average of 20,000 iPhones sold per day, in the 200 days since the iPhone became available, totaling 4,000,000 iPhones sold.

The software update will include an improvement to iPhone’s Maps feature which will enable users to find their location on maps. It’s not quite GPS, which would require a hardware upgrade, but instead works by bouncing signals off of multiple cell phone towers to triangulate the location of the iPhone.

Additional enhancements include using Web Clips to add icons to the iPhone for your favorite web sites, a customizable home screen, the ability to SMS (text message) multiple people at the same time, chapter navigation for movies, tighter Gmail integration, song lyric display, and movie rental from iTunes (more on this below). The software update is available now as a free download via iTunes for existing iPhone customers in the US, UK, Germany and France.

There will also be an update to the iPod Touch that moves it further away from a portable music player and closer in capability to that of a handheld computer. The iPod Touch software update includes: an HTML based email application (with the ability to display inline images, Adobe PDF, and Microsoft Word and Excel attachments), Google Maps, Web Clips, a customizable home screen, a stock and market tracking program, Notes (a text writing program), a Weather app (similar to the Mac Dashboard weather feature), music lyric display, and, of course, iTunes movie rental. The update is available immediately via iTunes for $19.99.