iPhone SDK, Wireless Calendar, Exchange Support and Remote Wipe

Apple held their much anticipated iPhone event today in the Town Hall Theater on the Apple Campus in Cupertino. This event was expected to address what many people have considered to be the major shortcomings of the iPhone. Apple has not let us down. According to Phil Schiller, SVP/Product Marketing with Apple, the following will be included in the next release of the iPhone software:

-Push Email (forces emails to your phone like a Blackberry)
-Wireless Calendar updates
-Push Contacts (contacts added to your computer are send via wireless to your iPhone)
-More secure VPN (Cisco IPSec, Two-Factor authentication, certificates and identities)
-Enterprise-class Wi-Fi with WPA2/802.1x.
-Tools to enforce security policies
-Mass deployment tools to autoconfigure large quantities of iPhones
-Remote wiping of data (lost or stolen iPhone will now be able to be wiped remotely for security)
-Microsoft Exchange support
-AIM Messaging
-iTunes Apps (purchase iPhone apps through iTunes, through desktop, Wi-Fi, or EDGE)
-Third-Party Development of Applications (non-web-based applications such as SalesForce, Epocrates, etc…)

Mr. Schiller demonstrated a working version of the Microsoft Exchange interface today, showing push e-mail, push calendaring, push contacts, global access lists and remote wipe through Exchange. He additionally displayed Epocrates (integrates Medical Dictionary, medical coder and diagnostic tools for diseases and drugs) running on the iPhone, with the ability for doctors to search for pills by color and shape as well as ID unknown pills. John Doerr, of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, a venture capitalist firm, is starting the iFund with $100 million for iPhone software development by entrepreneurs. Oh yeah, they also showed off a lot of games.

The bad news: this is only in beta… regular users won’t see the iPhone 2.0 update until June.