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Google Group Manager for Mobile Platforms, Rich Miner, jabbed at the Apple iPhone during promotion of Google's highly touted Linux-based Mobile OS, Android, at the Emerging Communications Conference in Silicon Valley this week. Despite the strong partnership between Apple and Google in the mobile arena, Miner evidently felt it necessary criticize the iPhone and the iPhone SDK in an attempt to highlight the strengths of the Android platform.

Miner offered up the following as an example of the inherent strength of the Android business model versus that of the iPhone, stating

A new video of an iPhone running iPhone firmware 2.0 has surfaced. Posted on Gizmodo earlier, the video shows an iPhone running a fully hacked iPhone firmware 2.0 (or 1.2, depending on who you're asking) and demonstrates many of the new features found in the updated firmware.

The 2.0 hack was completed by the iPhone Dev Team, and the hole that was found is described by the Dev Team to be considerably difficult for Apple to close. According to Gizmodo, the hole may be considered "impossible" to close.

The hacked 2.0 firmware allows any GSM carrier and the installation of any third party software. Watch the video below to see the 2.0 iPhone in action

After last week's announcement of the iPhone SDK, there have been a bevy of announcements and brainstorming sessions regarding what new applications will become available for the iPhone. One that many may not have counted on? Java. However, according to Sun Microsystem's vice president of Java marketing, Eric Klein, Sun is underway with efforts to bring a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) to the iPhone.

The JVM for the iPhone will be based on Java ME (micro edition) and will be distributed via the iPhone App Store for free to users who wish to add Java support to their iPhone.

As developers and other interested parties sift through the iPhone SDK, many new details are emerging. While most of these are positive, more recently some troublesome details have come to light. Several iPhoneFAQ readers have written in informing us of some strange limitations Apple is evidently placing on applications developed via the newly released SDK.

These limitations may place significant limitations on the types of software that can be developed for the iPhone using the SDK. These limitations include,

Bay Partners turned many a head in the financial and software development worlds when it drummed up $10 million dollars last year to fund application development for Facebook. On Friday, San Francisco venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers trumped that offer ten times over, by establishing a $100 million dollar fund to back software development for the Apple iPhone.