Since its release early last year, the iPhone has been selling like crazy. Its feature rich interface was designed with the consumer in mind, combining the features of Apple’s acclaimed iPod, with the convenience of a phone, allowing for music and video playback, surfing the web, and direct access to the iTunes Store. It seems that the only people left out are the business user. But with Apple’s plans to release a software development kit (SDK) to allow for users to create their own third party applications, the business user has something to smile about. Furthermore, with the 2.0 firmware to be released soon will add push email support, Virtual Private Network support, Cisco IPsec, WPA2 for 802.11x, as well as Microsoft Exchange and ActiveSync support.

All these will be valuable for any businessman or woman, though the most interesting feature may be handwriting support. A job listing on Apple’s website seeks a handwriting recognition engineer, with a well rounded knowledge in C/C++ coding, neutral net algorithms, and cocoa programming. The interesting thing is that Apple notes that the development and design “may extend beyond Mac OS X to other applications and the iPhone.”

The handwriting technology could provide the boost the iPhone needs to reach its business users. The iPhones onscreen keyboard has been widely criticized for its awkward design and any alternate input could be beneficial for its users.

This technology may also be part of the much rumored tablet MacBook, as well as Apple’s ModBook which already uses InkWell handwriting technology.