Arik Hesseldahl from Business Weeks’ blog, Byte of The Apple, claims that the release of the widely expected iPhone SDK will be delayed for one to three weeks.

The iPhone SDK was announced by Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, on October 17, 2007 in a statement posted on the company’s website.

“We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers”, wrote Jobs at the time. He also said that the software developer kitt will be released in February.

With the iPhone SDK, developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps. The iPhone does not have a chat application, for example.

According to the source quoted by Arik Hesseldahl, there is no justification given by Apple for the delay.