When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone today, it sounded at first like he was talking about three products. He said that it was a widescreen iPod, a mobile phone and an internet communicator. The widescreen iPod and mobile phone aspects of it were largely expected, but when he said ‘internet communicator’ he was talking about far more than an internet browser and possibly a java feed reader.

Apple announced two major partnerships to support this goal. Jobs was joined on stage by Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) and Jerry Yang (a founder of Yahoo!). Both are providing different areas of functionality to the iPhone, both potentially impressive.

On a side note, it must have hurt Eric and Jerry that they had to share a partnership with Apple, and didn’t manage to grab all of the business for themselves. It’s a mark of the power of Apple’s brand that Yahoo! and Google were prepared to work with each other just to be a part of the product.

The Google end of the deal involves Google Maps. On the iPhone, when you open Google Maps it will instantly know where you are (presumably from transmitter data). It will then allow you to move around and use a search feature to find local businesses, much like the computer-based product. A nice UI touch is the zooming in, which you do by placing your two fingers together like a pinch over the map, and then pulling them apart. Once you’ve found a local business, you will be able to call them from within the Maps interface. Satellite aerial photography is also available.

Yahoo! is also contributing fairly heavily. The new Yahoo! Go product, announced just yesterday at CES. According to the press release, the key features of this are a local maps widget (which is probably not included in the iPhone product given the partnership with Google), personalised news and stocks etc, photo sharing and email.

They also have a new kind of search built in, called ‘oneSearch’, which is supposed to give answers more useful for mobile users. As I understand it, if I search for ‘pizza’ on Yahoo Go it will return the locations and contact details of local pizza restaurants, whereas if I search for it on the main version of Yahoo, it will provide me with information about Pizza. All fairly sensible.

So those are the two partnerships summed up. We have more posts about the Apple announcements earlier today coming, as well as a podcast, and you can find all of our posts in the Apple category.