Third-party iPhone applications to arrive Monday?

The era of officially sanctioned iPhone applications should kick off on Monday.

That's the same day Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to take the stage at the Moscone Center to unveil the next-generation iPhone at the company's annual Worldwide Developers' Conference. A source at a software company that has been working on a native iPhone application tells us the company is getting ready to launch that application on Monday, which could also imply that Apple's App Store will be up and running that day.

The App Store is going to be the only way to get official third-party iPhone applications onto your device. Developers have been submitting their applications to Apple for testing and verification since the iPhone SDK became available, and in exchange for hosting and distributing the applications Apple is taking 30 percent of the revenue generated by sales of that application.

Gizmodo has reported that the newest iPhone--which is expected to connect to 3G cellular networks--will be immediately available on Monday. Based on this latest information, the iPhone 2.0 software--which enables the delivery of official applications through the App Store as well as several other business-friendly features--should also be available for download on Monday.

That software is supposed to work with both the current version of the iPhone and the widely expected 3G version that should make its debut this month, so you won't have to buy a new iPhone to start using iPhone applications.

But you might want to buy a new one if you get lost on a regular basis. The same source was able to confirm reports from earlier this week from GigaOm and Wired that the newest iPhone will have support for GPS technology, enabling the iPhone to get a precise fix on your location. The combination of GPS and faster networking speeds should allow for a whole range of location-aware applications to proliferate on the iPhone, as they have on other competing phones.