When Steve Jobs unveiled his company’s eagerly-awaited Apple iPhone last January, search marketers everywhere contemplated the same question in their heads: will the iPhone be the key to finally unlock mobile search?

The phone has a sleek, impressive design and an innovative set of features, a combination that is often difficult to balance in most mobile devices. Part iPod, part phone, and part Internet access device, Apple’s new mobile baby runs on Mac OS X, is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled, and has a 2-megapixel camera and an 8-gig hard drive.

Many features from OS X make a cameo, including Dashboard Widgets like Weather, Calculator, Calendar, and Stocks. It also runs a new touch screen technology which Apple is calling “multi-touch.” Also included is a major mobile search addition – Apple’s own Safari web browser.

The iPhone can access the internet through WiFi hot spots or through the Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) system. It will also use this system to download and sync email from most IMAP and POP systems, including Microsoft Exchange servers, Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail.

But for search marketers, the most significant feature of the iPhone is its rich local search capabilities.

The iPhone, which is expected to ship as soon as next month, will come bundled with Google search and maps, and Yahoo! OneSearch, Go, and mail which will provide iPhone Safari users with convenient access to information.

The new mobile browsing experience may force the extinction of text-based pages, but all the existing guidelines for mobile search optimization will certainly apply.

If the phone will become as popular as the iPod, local search on mobile devices is bound to become a very big deal,  says Mike Boland in a report by the Kelsey Group.

In the past, the adoption of mobile local search has been hampered by the inferior user experiences of most mobile devices. Apple’s cache with consumers from the iPod and iTunes should ensure a healthy demand for this phone,  says Boland. Time will tell how well they embrace it, and if it does anything to push forward mobile local search in general.”

Like the iPod, a slew of third-party devices and applications will most likely emerge for the phone, and mobile local search could find its tipping point somewhere in the new Apple device.

Last December, Newsweek.com predicted that  if 2006 was all about social networks, user-generated content, and YouTube 2007 will be the Year of the Widget.

A widget engine is a host software system for physically inspired applets on the desktop. Two commonly known types of widgets are the Yahoo! Widgets and the Dashboard widgets of Apple Macintosh computer users. Microsoft refers to them as gadgets, both in Windows Vista and the Windows Live system..

Widgets are downloadable interactive virtual tools that provide services that show the user the latest news, the current weather, a dictionary, a map program, sticky notes, or even a language translator, among other things..

These mini-applications are can be dragged onto a desktop or pasted into a personal page, where they are constantly updated with information. Think of it as tech jewelrybling for your blog; ice for your desktop, writes Newsweek.com’s Brian Braker..

This year alone, widgets will be featured in the two major operating systems. Vista, Microsoft Windows new operating system, will come with 11 gadgets out of the box and also offer users the ability to build more and upload them to Windows Live. Apple, on the other hand, is set to launch Leopard, the newest version of its Mac OS X, which will let users build widgets from scratch and share them with others, even if they’ve never written a line of code..

Even content providers like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and ESPN have also started allowing users to design the page they see when they log on. Flickr.com lets its members create a badge that they can post on their blogs and personal home pages to let friends know when they’ve uploaded new snapshots. Fox Interactive Media (which includes MySpace, RottenTomatoes.com and AskMen.com) has already launched its own platform, called SpringWidgets.

This is good news for advertisers. Widgets offer a range of digital marketing techniques, including online PR, strategic viral marketing, brand advertising, direct response sales, and lead generation through affiliate marketing..

Sanaz Ahari, Microsoft’s Lead Program Manager, believes widgets will introduce a new form of marketing in the near future. I can see a whole new level of advertising through gadgets, she states in a FastCompany.com interview. An early example was when Google had that Da Vinci Code gadget a replica of the ‘cryptex,’ the cylindrical decoder device from the book and movie. You could take the puzzle and put it on your Web page for your friends to discover. That was great. Create something cool, and people will distribute your brand for you. And content will become the new forum for advertising.