As you may already know, the imminent iPhone 2.0 software is set to provide more document viewing capabilities, including readers for PowerPoint, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. However, while these readers will certainly be handy, Apple still has not announced any plans to provide a way to edit docs on the run—a capability especially important to those of us interested in mobile learning.

Today, our friends at TUAW report that at WWDC ’08 Mariner Software announced their plans to mitigate part of this editing dilemma with the release of Mariner Calc for the iPhone, the popular Excel-compatible spreadsheet for the Mac, which will provide iPhone users with the ability to view and edit Excel files in their native file format. According to company president, Mike Wray, Mariner Calc for iPhone will support multiple sheets per document, charts and objects. In addition, the app boasts a maximum of 1,000,000 rows and 32,000 columns.

TUAW asserts that Mariner Calc for iPhone is about 80% of the way to completion and is expected to ship about the time the virtual doors open on the App Store. No price has been set for Mariner Calc for iPhone, but expect this little spreadsheet to be a popular purchase from the App Store.

According to AppleInsider, Apple is “intensively” considering the possibility of selling the iPhone 3G on college campuses. Campus iPhone availability will naturally kick off at schools where Apple already has a strong presence, but based on their assessment of demand in the next couple of months, Apple could be making the decision to aggressively push university iPhone sales.

As Ars Technica suggests, Apple’s move to market the iPhone on college campuses could be the first step in a new effort to branch out in sales. Now that the iPhone will require some kind of in-store contract signing to insure activation of the device on AT&T, Apple could get the device in front of a lot more consumers by starting on campus. If Apple truly wants to liberate the iPhone from the shelves of AT&T and retail Apple Stores, what better place to begin the movement than in institutions of higher learning?

Last week at the 2008 Computex Taipei Conference, the largest computer exhibition in Asia, Honlai Technology unveiled the QingBar MP101 portable iPhone/iPod projector. At a 76 x 102 x 54mm, the MP101 is capable of projecting a 15-to 27-inch display from your iPhone or iPod touch in a 4:3 aspect ratio. The device features a VGA resolution of 640 x 480 pixels with 16.7 million colors, a 2W speaker, and a 5W LED with a lamp life of over 20,000 hrs.

Paired with the enterprise level applications of the upcoming iPhone 2.0, the convenience and portability of the QinBar MP101 might make it a very valuable presentation tool for teachers and students.

As you know, Monday’s WWDC keynote revealed a number of interesting new applications for the iPhone that will be available through Apple’s new App Store. The store will offer applications in a variety of categories—games, business, education, entertainment, finance, health and fitness, productivity, social networking, etc.—that will utilize iPhone technology like the Multi-Touch interface, the accelerometer, GPS, real-time 3D graphics and 3D positional audio.

Among the vanguard of iPhone apps are a number of potentially useful applications for mobile learning:

• First, an advanced to-do list application called Zenbe Lists, which allows you to keep track of chores and calendar lists. In addition to making lists, the application enables you to check off accomplished tasks and sync events with your contacts. Sounds great for keeping track of assignments, appointments, etc.
• Two new medical applications were demonstrated during the keynote. The first, Modality, is an anatomy application for students, which is linked to Wikipedia and Google to provide a multitude of sources. The second, MIMvista, allows doctors to view and manipulate PET and CT scan images from their iPhones.
• Kooaba might be one of the most interesting new apps because it uses the relatively new concept of an image driven search. With image recognition, the application allows you to point the iPhone’s camera at a movie poster and receive information and show times on the movie. While this might not be incredibly relevant for teaching and learning presently, the concept of image recognition offers a host of potential educational uses.
• As we’ve previously reported, TypePad has developed a new blogging client, which will work on the fly and will allow geo tagging of images. Images can be uploaded right from the camera on the iPhone. Also, it will support photo blogging, which is a huge plus for many.
• The AP showed off their mobile news network. This application will cache news for you so you can read it on the go. Because it caches the news, you won’t need a network connection to stay up-to-date on all the latest news.
• Finally, a social networking application called Loopt uses location feeds to help you find friends on the go. With Loopt iPhone users will be able to pinch, tap and drag an interactive map to find their friends and see what they’re are up to. This might be a handy way to meet up with classmates, colleagues and teachers.

While it certainly wasn’t the most consequential revelation from yesterday’s WWDC keynote in which Jobs, of course, introduced the iPhone 3G, the App Store, MobileMe and more, the iPhone 2.0’s scientific calculator could prove quite beneficial for mobile learning initiatives.

In iPhone 2.0 users will be able to rotate the standard calculator to landscape mode for a scientific calculator, which offers all the functions you would expect from your old TI-85 including squares and square roots, sin, cos, tan and factorials.

Perhaps the new sci calc won’t be the feature that sends people running to pick up a new iPhone (which, at $199 for an 8GB, will certainly be a significant number of folks), but the added functionality will be a nice bonus for those of us using the device as a tool for teaching and learning.

As we brace ourselves for the upcoming WWDC iPhone hardware, 2.0 firmware and App Store announcements this week, it might be a good idea to warm up with a confirmed software announcement.

Last night, Sling Media, purveyor of an Internet-streaming peripheral called the Slingbox, announced its official development of an iPhone client. Dubbed SlingPlayer Mobile, the client will allow Slingbox owners to stream any video from their TV input over the Internet to their iPhone.

Ars Technica reports that SlingPlayer Mobile won’t be ready for release at the WWDC tomorrow, but the company has been testing the waters with both the iPhone SDK and a jailbroken phone.

Yesterday, Unwired Review posted an interesting article about Microsoft’s recent patent of a “device manners policy” (DMP), “a wireless zone enforced device protocol that allows local operators to turn certain features off (or on) based on local manners and safety policy.” Such a concept would be used by administrators to communicate expected or required compliance “manners”—like “no talking out loud” or “no photography”—to attendant mobile devices.

As Unwired suggests with DMP, audio recording could be disabled at concerts, video recording killed at theaters, and ringers turned off at funerals. Naturally, educators will see the DMP as an opportunity to retain some amount of control in classrooms filled with converged mobile devices.

The system might be implemented in several ways. Unwired proposes that bigger venues and businesses may have a separate box - DMP server - which transmits information about allowed actions to all mobile devices within it’s reach. Or nearby devices might wirelessly talk to each other and agree on the limits of acceptable behavior. Policies may be transmitted via carrier network and implemented at certain locations via GPS positioning or tower triangulation. Unwired asserts that in some cases even some non-perceptible to human signals, like invisible (to human eye) watermark or inaudible (to human ear) audio signals and RFID tags may be used to lock some functionality of the mobile device.

Of course, this all requires manufacturers to comply with the DMP protocol in their devices. And as Unwired points out, the entire endeavor might be pointless for WinMo devices if iPhones, Nokias, and Blackberries aren’t interested.

VUVOX’s Collage, a media creation suite that enables users to turn photos, videos, text and audio clips into interactive narrative presentations, is featuring a fantastic sample “collage” covering the 2008 Horizon Report’s key emerging technologies.

This proto-collage maps out the report’s three adoption horizons, naturally employing a multimedia extravaganza to highlight educational technologies such as grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband and collective intelligence. The presentation includes some great videos from universities already working with many of the report’s emerging technologies (including ACU).

A “collage” can be published, embedded and syndicated into any website, blog or social networking site. Plus, users can utilize image cut-out and masking tools, layer positioning and compositing, interactive ‘Hot-spots’—providing links to media, text or other websites—rich media details and text and soundtrack tools in the creation of their collages.

Collage promises to be a very handy teaching and learning tool and is certainly worth checking out for yourself.

Yesterday, TUAW reported Ifbyphone’s plans to release a “Voice Broadcast” app through iPhone’s App Store in June. The application will apparently allow you to transmit voice messages to multiple recipients; essentially enabling iPhone users to send recorded messages to as many recipients as they wish without using their calling plan minutes.

Voice Broadcast will work by selecting a group of recipients from the iPhone’s Address Book, then entering the delivery date and time. The Voice Broadcast application lets you record a message, which is then sent at the appointed time. Because the message is being sent as data, it doesn’t impact the number of minutes you’ve selected in your calling plan. This could be quite a handy tool for teachers and students collaborating in mobile learning endeavors.

However, as TUAW asserts with a week to go before WWDC, a great deal of uncertainty still surrounds the process of the iPhone app store. TUAW asks the compelling question, “What if someone releases a VOIP app through Apple’s official store? What would AT&T have to say about that?” It’s conceivable that conflict my surface if a developer delivers functionality that intersects with Apple or AT&T’s profitability.

Apple recently announced their new back-to-school promotion, offering university students, faculty, and staff members who buy a Mac before September 15th a free iPod touch or iPod nano.

This promo is especially compelling to those of us interested in mobile learning because it demonstrates Apple’s commitment to the touch platform and ensures that a large number of these devices will be on our campuses this fall.

To qualify for the deal, you must purchase an 8GB iPod touch or an 8GB iPod nano with your Mac. After you purchase your Mac and iPod, submit a rebate claim online by October 15 to receive a rebate of up to $299.