Steve Jobs Keynote for MacWorld 2008 included several bits of good news for iPhone owners and people who are thinking of getting an iPhone soon. With the latest free software update, firmware 1.1.3, the Apple iPhone adds a location finder to the Maps feature, Google Maps will now support your own current location. It’s not GPS but a Google triangulation using other cellphones which apparently works really well in a densely populated areas. Another added features is the multi-person SMS chats, it will let you send SMS to several addresses at the same time. This is quite common in other phones but the iPhone was sadly lacking this until now. What else? the ability to add Web sites to the home screen (just like you would in a computer screen), Webclips, language, subtitle and chapters on videos and lyrics support has been added for music tracks.

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The Maps interface has been streamlined in the latest update, with Search and Directions buttons in the middle; a button in the bottom right that curls up your map to offer the option to drop a pin anywhere you want, show traffic, and view in map, satellite, and hybrid views; and a button in the bottom left that finds your location on a map. Apple worked with Google and Skyhook Wireless to create the location feature. Google uses technology that looks for cell phone towers to triangulate your location while Skyhook uses 23 million mapped Wi-Fi hotspots. When it finds your location, Maps overlays a blue circle that shows your approximate position.

The iPhone’s new Webclips feature lets you bookmark a Web page as a button on the iPhone’s home screen. In addition to saving the site’s web address, the Webclip icon remembers the Safari browser’s page location and zoom settings, allow you to bookmark not just a single page, but a particular location on a page. To create a Web click, you navigate to a Web page in the browser, then click the plus-symbol icon at the bottom of the screen. When you choose the new Add To Home Screen option, the iPhone allows you to give your Webclip a custom name and then adds it to your home screen.

Speaking of the home screen, you can now move the icons on the home screen and rearrange them as desired. Hold down your finger on an icon and all your buttons will begin to shimmy, showing they are ready to be dragged around. You can also have up to nine screens worth of buttons, so you can put all your Web clips on a separate screen or move unused programs out of the way.

Video playback has improved with this update. When watching a video, you can now click on a chapters button to open the Chapter Guide. It shows you all the chapters in a video, along with thumbnails and the time at which they begin. And you can now take advantage of alternate languages or subtitles that are included in video files.

Steve Jobs also announced some milestones for the iPhone. Officially, the iPhone sells 20,000 units every day, which totals 4 million units in customer hands to date. That gives the iPhone a 19.5-percent share of the U.S., the combined percentage of the next three largest companies—Palm, Motorola, and Nokia in smartphone market as of the September 2007 quarter according to figures Jobs quoted from market-research firm Gartner. The iPhone only trails BlackBerry maker RIM, which has a 39 percent market share

The iPhone will add a 16GB option which will retail for the original 4GB iPhone price of $499. The 8GB will be $399. Steve also revealed that they have found a Japanese distributor: NTT DoCoMo. iPhone Japan will launch in March.