Stories by: Michael DeAgonia

It's been a busy June for Apple, starting with its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and the release of new laptops, following that on June 17 with the release of the iPhone OS 3.0 operating system and capping it all off with the release of the iPhone 3GS on Friday in eight countries.

Apple Inc. today pushed out the much-anticipated iPhone OS 3.0 update that company execs touted at last week's Worldwide Developers Conference. After spending some time with iPhone 3.0 on both an original Edge-based iPhone and last year's 3G model, I can tell you the update makes even older phones more responsive and offers a number of improvements -- some of them long overdue. Aside from the new features I highlight below, iPhone owners who download the update through iTunes will notice that, overall, the user interface is smoother. Animations don't stutter as they did before and data loads more quickly.

Ah, the Apple App Store. Since July 2008, the month when Apple opened its wildly popular library of applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the world has been treated to more than 20,000 apps, with some 500 million downloaded as of February 2009.

Not all of them were home runs, but they all made a big splash.

We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the iPhone's release, so people who feel strongly about the popular smart phone have had plenty of time to weigh in with their wallets -- it's been a consistent seller since its US release last June 29 -- or with epithets. (Remember the early description of iPhone fans as "iPhonies?")

Recently, I read an interesting report regarding iPhone use. Market research firm iSuppli found that many people use iPhones in ways that differ markedly from other phones, especially in categories that until recently weren't that important to most users.

In front of me, two 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays glow softly at my desk. Beside me sits the fastest stock-configuration Macintosh that Apple has ever shipped: a superfast eight-core Mac Pro. Inside the Mac -- and on full display on those screens -- is Mac OS X 10.5, better known as Leopard, Apple's latest operating system. All around me is the work I've been putting off that is now getting done.

When it comes to Apple's new operating system, Leopard, users are likely to notice the flashy graphics and animations, the tight integration of applications and the speed with which it churns through data. What they don't see are a large number of the under-the-hood changes that Apple built in so that its own developers -- and those who come up with third-party apps -- use all of that underlying software goodness.

When I first walked into the house the day I bought my iPhone, I had a moment of panic. After six months of media frenzy and amongst all of the excitement, I had lost sight of the fact that the 8GB iPhone I bought at a nearby AT&T store had set me back US$600.