So, there’re new rumours regarding an alleged iPhone Nano. This time there’s even a picture illustrating the new device. I think that this is once again fake. For one, Apple just axed Steve’s speech at this MacWorld. If there really was an iPhone Nano, wouldn’t Steve Jobs want to disclose it to the public himself, instead of letting Phil Schiller do it?

Another doubt comes with the sole idea of a minimized version of the iPhone. A large deal of the iPhone experience comes from the App Store. These applications have been written for the specific display resolution of the current iPhone / iPod Touch hardware. A new device with a smaller screen wouldn’t be able to sufficiently run these applications. I highly doubt that Apple would want a differentiated device landscape, where every developer has to include countless special cases in his code to account for all the quirks of the different devices available (much like with web development). 

So, given that there’s not Steve Jobs at MacWorld, and that an iPhone Nano presumably wouldn’t be able to run App Store applications, I highly doubt the existence of an iPhone Nano. I hope I am wrong though, as a cheap iPhone would expand the App Store audience even further.

Apple’s much anticipated iPhone 2 was released in the US today. As previously reported, the phone is on a 3G network and is half the price of the original iPhone. The iPhone 2 firmware is also available to download from Apple to install on the original iPhone for via the Apps Store. The firmware will.

In related news, Apple’s new MobileMe service went live on July 10th. MobileMe, which replaces .Mac offers email, calendar, and other services.

Today is the first day of the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. With over 5,000 people in attendance, this is one of the largest WWDC’s yet.

The House That Steve Built has some exciting announcements that have been coming seemingly every minute. Among the highlights are for the first half of the day are:

- Not only is iPhone 2.0 in beta with over 4,000 people in the beta program, but that there will be three parts to the SDK: Enterprise, SDK, as well as new features for the end users.

- Several demos from SEGA, Apple, eBay, Pangea Software, MIMVista, among others.

- SEGA shows off a video of Super Monkey Ball, which will be a launch title in the new App Store for $9.99 USD.

- MIMVista shows off a program designed to help medical students study and learn various parts of the body with almost realistic images.

- Steve anounces new iPhone 2.0 features, including contact search, support for Microsoft Office documents, and support for Asian languages. The iPhone is set to be released July 11th.

- Mobile.Me is the replacement for .mac, current .mac subscribers will be automatically updated to the new service. A 60-day trial of Mobile.Me will be included with the iPhone 2.0.

- The new iPhone will be thiner, sexier, include support for a 3G network, Enterprise support, more affordable, available in more countries, and have advanced GPS support.

- Target price for an 8GB iPhone 2.0 will be $199, a savings of $200 over the current price of the iPhone.

- Later in the day, Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard was announced, but would feature no new features, only improvements over older ones.

Google’s Android, the imho only real competitor to the iPhone SDK, if it comes to the future of mobile computing, has so far been lacking information regarding usability and its interface. However yesterday, on the Google IO Keynote, lots of details were revealed. They demonstrated the Android touchscreen prototype and explained how the main interface, webbrowser and more works. You can find demonstration videos and pictures on slashgear. Out of all “so called” iPhone Competitors, this is in my opinion the first serious solution. The interface seems to be thoughtfuly designed and easily navigable by hand / touch. The Browser has interesting options to ease the information overload on such a small device.

The iPhone has obviously stirred the mobile marked in a big way (judge for example how suddenly every new phone is being compared to the iPhone, sometimes even by the manufacturer himself), competitors haven’t currently been able to offer a serious competitor though. The reason for this is rather simple: The lack of software. A quickly hacked and enhanced interface based on Symbian or Windows Mobile can’t compete with a Plattform like OS X iPhone, which is on the one hand based on years of Mac OS X experience, and on the other hand has been thoughtfully designed over years.

Android however seems to adress these issues. Google has the manpower, will and backing to develop a serious plattform, and smart decisions, like building on Linux, stress the future significance of this plattform. If Apple and Google play their moves right, there might be two major mobile plattforms in the future: OS X iPhone and Android – Symbian, Windows Mobile et al moving more and more out of significance.

Following on the fresh release of Mac OS X 10.5.3, version 6 of the iPhone SDK just arrived. Details regarding changes and additions can be found in TUAW’s liveblog. As we already speculated, there seems to be a strong correlation between the new SDK and 10.5.3, as it is a prequisite for installing.