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The Apple CEO told the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg that the company is on track to ship the first of the smartphone-cum-iPods in late June.

'I think we'll ship a lot of them,' Jobs said, before rhetorically asking, 'Will it be enough? I don't know. I hope not.'

Asked whether Apple will allow some third-party software to be loaded on to the handset,

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Jobs said that it had not been ruled out but that the company is still looking for a way to enable developers build iPhone applications.

'We would like to solve this problem and if you could just be a little more patient with us, we'll do it,' he said.

He emphasised that it is not as simple as porting existing OS X applications, since the touch-controlled iPhone interface is radically different from the mouse- and menu-driven Mac UI. However he did assure Mossberg that iPhone runs a full version of the Mac operating system.

'Yes it does,' he said. 'The entire OS is gigabytes, but it's data. We don't need desktop patterns, sound files. If you take out the data, the OS isn't that huge.'

That means, he said, that it has also got 'real Safari, real desktop e-mail'.

Earlier in the in the interview Jobs promised new iPods - though no date was provided - which he said will be 'awesome', 'the best we've ever done'.