Apple has officially launched the iPhone 3G App Store to promote third-party applications which run natively on the iPhone and iPod Touch, a move it had originally opposed.

The company has already made 500 applications available to users by way of iTunes and the iPhone 2.0 software upgrade.

The update foreshadows the hotly anticipated iPhone 3G, which is set to go on sale on 12 July.

Companies already offering iPhone applications include Facebook, Flickr, Cisco and eBay.

Google is offering a search application that scours the user's iPhone and the web and can offer map information based on the user's location.

Games vendor Electronic Arts is already offering Sudoku, Tetris and Scrabble games for the handset.

The initial round of iPhone app store offerings are the first to be developed with Apple's iPhone SDK.

Tim Westergren, founder and chief strategy officer at Pandora, told vnunet.com that the development experience for the iPhone was more like a desktop app than a mobile phone application.

Pandora developed a standalone music player for the device which taps into a user's online Pandora account and syncs stations and song preferences from the service.

Westergren explained that the iPhone player was so successful that elements of it will be used for the next web-based Pandora player.

"The nice thing about it is that it has all these tools," Westergren said of the SDK. "It allows us to do a great application."