With less than two weeks to go before the official launch of the iPhone, Apple has announced some upgrades to its revolutionary communications device.

First was the announcement of hardware upgrades to the iPhone which boosts battery life to eight hours and a new glass face that features “a superior level of scratch resistance and optical clarity”. Besides yapping on your iPhone for eight straight hours, you could also browse the web for 6 hours, or watch videos for 7 hours or listen to music for 24 hours straight. If these claims are true, iPhone will kick the butts of its competitors hands down, according to this handy table that Apple PR prepared.

Two days later in an announcement about YouTube, Apple also revealed that iPhone will have an application to wireless stream YouTube content over Wi-Fi or EDGE. Interestingly, ZDNet reports that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that:

iPhone is a powerful new device and is going to be particularly good for the apps that Google is building. You should expect other announcements from the two companies over time

There’s also a new iPhone ad that’s appeared on US TV to show off this new feature (that features a hilarious skateboarding dog), which you can also find on the iPhone website. Speaking of the iPhone website, it’s been updated to show off previously unknown features of the iPhone, like new widgets and Safari’s bookmarks browser. The iPhone fanboys at TUAW have a good summary of all the new stuff.

I wonder what other surprises Apple has in store for the iPhone. Well, it’s 7 days and counting…

Update: Apple has posted a brand new guided tour of the iPhone on their website. The tour, which is roughly 20 minutes in length, explains all external ports and switches and reveals more information about iPhone’s headphones.

All these iPhone news and updates are making me want an iPhone more than ever, which I’m sure was exactly their intention. I’m sure it will sell like crazy and make Apple and AT&T a ton of money. Developers are scrambling to create their killer iPhone app to make themselves a ton of money too. Luckily the good folks at Marketcircle have released iPhoney, a free iPhone simulator that provides a “pixel-accurate web browsing environment” to test your iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 application.

Neat huh? This is probably the closest I’ll come to playing with the iPhone in the next few months. I wish I had studied web development back when I was in uni…