iPhone to support third-party Web 2.0 applications

San Francisco (CA) - Apple has taken first steps to create a developer community around its upcoming iPhone platform.

According to the company, the iPhone will be able to run to create Web 2.0-based applications and will allow programmers to develop applications that such as can access the phones features making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps. Apple said that these applications can be fine tuned to behave "just like the applications built into iPhone" while keeping the rest of the phone "secure and reliable."

The company did not specify which Web 2.0 technologies will be supported and which not, but mentioned that it expects these applications to be "far more interactive and responsive" than traditional web applications. "[They] can be easily distributed over the Internet and painlessly updated by simply changing the code on the developers’ own servers. The modern web standards also provide secure data access and transactions, like those used with Amazon.com or online banking," Apple wrote in a press release.