Today was a wonderful day to be an iPhone owner. At a special press event today on their Cupertino campus, Apple announced some new features to be available as part of an upcoming firmware version 2.0. Additionally, Apple execs discussed some of new enterprise features (FINALLY), and a beta version of the SDK was finally released.

Let’s start with the iPhone enterprise features because I’ve been eagerly awaiting these since last June. The new enterprise features include the following:

• Push email
• Push calendar
• Push contacts
• Global address list
• Cisco IPsec VPN
• Certificates and Identities
• Support for WPA2 / 802.1x
• Enforced security policies
• Device configuration
• Remote wipe
• Active Sync and Microsoft Exchange Support

Can we pause briefly to say: YES! Since June I’ve been carrying around two phones, one for personal use (iPhone), and one for business (Windows Mobile), and it will be awesome to be able to consolidate down to a single device. Additionally, the iPhone will support multiple calendaring systems so those of you like me who sync to a Mac but will use corporate email will be to sync both iCal and Outlook. Nifty.

The bad news, unfortunately, is that this functionality is currently limited to a beta program of five users per company, and full roll-out won’t be coming until some time in June (why must Jobs continue to torture us?).

As mentioned above, Apple also released a beta version of the much anticipated SDK (software development kit). The iPhone SDK is essentially a comprehensive set of developer tools based on existing Mac OS X technologies that will allow for development of native iPhone applications. The SDK is broken down as follows:

Cocoa Touch - Multi-touch events, Multi-touch controls, Acceleromter, View Hierarchy, Localization, Alerts, Web View, People Picker, Image Picker, Camera
Media - Core Audio, OpenAL, Audio Mixing, Audio Recording, Video Playback, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDS Quartz, Core Animation, Embedded OpenGL
Core Services - Collections, Address Book, Networking, File access, SQLite, Core Location, Net Services Threading, Preferences, URL utilities
Core OS - OS X Kernel, BSD TCP/IP, Sockets, Power Management, Keychain, Certificates, File System, Lib System, Security, Bonjour

Additionally, there is an iPhone emulator for Leopard 10.5.2+ to assist with development.

At the press event today Apple demoed a few native iPhone applications built by companies that received an early copy of the SDK. The following apps got demoed:

• Epocrates
• Salesforce.com
• AIM
• Super Monkey Ball (game from SEGA)

iPhone apps — as speculated — will be distributed through iTunes, however they can also be downloaded wirelessly (EDGE or WiFi) directly from the iPhone. The App Store will feature both paid and free software, depending on the wishes of the developer. For paid software, there will be a one-time $99 digital certificate fee to get your software listed in the iTunes App Store, but again this is a one-time fee and does not apply to each submission to the store.

The beta version of the SDK can be downloaded here.

Now for some screen shots.

Enterprise features:

SDK:

AIM:

Again, as I alluded to earlier, don’t get your hopes up, because these features aren’t going to be fully rolled-out until some time in June. In the meantime, however, developers are free to start working on some apps. I fully intend to download the SDK and play around a bit, so expect some more posts on this if anything comes to fruition.

A final note, Apple said today that it will NOT restrict VoIP applications that utilize WiFi, so there’s some serious promise in that space. Also, iPod Touch users will have access to these same new additions, however they — unlike iPhone owners — will be forced to pay a “nominal” fee.

Any questions feel free to hit me up in the comments. (A big thank you to Engadget for the pics)