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Apple iPhone owners will be receiving the iPhone 2.0 firmware in early July when the 3G version of the device ships.

The update will be available for free for existing iPhone users, but those owning an iPod Touch will have to pay $9.95 to get it.

Along with the iPhone 3G Apple has announced the forthcoming availability of the 2.0 firmware update.

The update will be available in the beginning of July charge free, and will feature an enhanced calculator with scientific mode, bulk email move/delete, parental controls, contact search, and the ability to save e-mail photo attachments in the iPhone's photo gallery application.

Finally it's happened! The 3G iPhone we've all been anxiously waiting for for quite a long time was officially announced today. Without the unnecessary talk let's get down to business. The most notable features (or rather improvements) of the new handset include:

• Thinner edges;
  
• Plastic back;
  
• Headphone jack;
  
• iPhone 2.

Now this is interesting.

Reportedly, four teenagers were banned for life from all the Apple stores in the world just because they have downloaded a third-party racing game to their iPhones at Apple’s University Avenue store. And to think Apple was planning to start encouraging customers to download similar apps to their phones beginning next month.

Don't you guys think you're overreacting?

Nevertheless, the company's officials deny the fact of any bans from their side, but are short on details.

A telecom company TeliaSonera announced that later this year it will start offering the Apple iPhone in the following countries:

• Sweden,
• Norway,
• Denmark,
• Finland,
• Lithuania,
• Latvia
• and Estonia.

Following Vodafone's recent announcement about it bringing the iPhone to 10 more European countries, America Movil in its turn announced will be bringing the handset to 16 countries in the Latin America, thanks to a deal with Apple.

Cool, I guess soon the whole world will be able to experience the pleasure of using the iPhone...

According to Chinese Commercial Times, handset manufacturer Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai) will start producing 3G iPhones in the end of May and plans to ship 3 million units in June.

The company expects to produce about 24-25 million handsets by the time they will be phased out.

If that's true, Apple will have to release the phone worldwide without any delays.

Looks like Apple iPhone will finally add handwriting recognition to its feature set.

A Chinese developer created a new application for the handset that recognizes both Chinese and Latin characters.

The program is still a beta, and doesn't support the landscape mode, as well as writing e-mails by hand. However, expect these problems to be fixed soon.

Apple iPhone SDK Beta 3 has been released!

The new beta includes a new tutorial, a variety of bug fixes and "support for the latest iPhone OS." Also, some modifications were made to the Beta 2.0 that was released about 10 days ago.

Developers can get the latest version of the SDK from here: developer.apple.com/iphone

As expected, Apple iPhone became available in Austria through T-Mobile. The carrier offers 8GB and 16GB versions priced at 399 EUR and 499 EUR respectively.

There are also two calling plans available, including:

• Classic (39 EUR) - 1,000 voice minutes, $0.25 SMS messages, 3GB of data and visual voicemail support;
• Supreme (55 EUR) - 1,000 voice minutes, 1,000 SMS messages, 3GB of data and visual voicemail support.