As you have most likely heard, Apple today announced the iPhone 3G at their annual WWDC event. The phone’s most obvious new feature is the HSDPA 3G cellular data connection that now enables the phone to have faster cellular internet connectivity. This replaces the old iPhone’s EDGE technology which was on the dial-up end of the internet speed spectrum. HSDPA in the iPhone 3G is closer to wi-fi speeds as demonstrated by Apple. The phone itself has changed very little cosmetically. We’re talking about millimeters in size differences, and a plastic back on the iPhone 3G instead of easily scratched aluminum. The iPhone 3G will be available with a black or white back.
Probably the second most significant hardware change is the addition of GPS. Apple says that the iPhone 3G will use a combination of GPS, wi-fi and cell towers to pin-point the position of the user. The iPhone EDGE used Locate Me, a function that provided a rough estimate of the users position based on cell tower information. With the addition of GPS the system is accurate enough to locate the street the user is on and give driving directions, something that couldn’t be done due to the inaccuracy of the Locate Me technology of the iPhone EDGE.
Another one of the anticipated upgrades is to the iPhone’s operating system. The iPhone 2.0 firmware will be released when the iPhone 3G comes out on July 11th. At the same time, Apple will make the update free to iPhone EDGE users, and available to iPod Touch users for $9.95. The 2.0 software will bring some increased functionality to the current feature set including things such as mass email management and contact searching. Additionally, 2.0 will bring the App Store onto the home screen of iPhone/iPod Touch users, and will allow them to download applications wirelessly to their device. The store will offer a combination of free and purchasable applications. Developers who charge for their apps keep 70% of the cost; for those who will be releasing free apps, Apple has said there will be no charges to the developer. Along for the ride in the 2.0 firmware is a lot of support for enterprise users including VPN connectivity, Exchange support, and more.
This time around Apple has worked with AT&T to subsidize the iPhone to a more attractive price point. The iPhone EDGE was released as an 8GB model for $599 USD, while an iPhone 3G will only run you $199, with the 16GB version following at $299 (of course this is all with a contract from AT&T). In addition to reduced pricing, Apple has stated its goal to release the iPhone 3G in 70 countries this year.
Check the technical specifications on Apple’s website for the dirty details of the new phone.
We’ll have some thoughts from the UMPCPortal team in a later post. Is it a MID? Is it good value? Does it improve the Internet Experience? What about video and cam capabilities? Bluetooth profiles improved?
The price’s right the feature are there….and the Apple “experience” is priceless…..AWESOME DEVICE!!!
After nickel and dime ing of the Touch users with V2.0 of the O/S.. Jobs can take this phone and shove it where the sun don’t shine (if you know what I mean)
I will get the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 its far better than this POS My touch will be my last apple kit that I buy
Oh and it will tank in Japan !!!!
Ah the Apple “experience†is priceless … you mean bend over and lube up ??
2.0M Camera (Hahahhahaha)
no camera flash
No front Camera
No Video mode
No extra storage
No SD or any memory slot
Crippled Bluetooth stereo Profiles
No user replacable battery
No Cut and Paste
restricted software installs
thats one great Apple “experience†no thanks enjoy your kool-aid
their “multitasking” solution is a bit wacky. it has more in common with push mail then anything else.
and given that, it seems there will be ever more “big apple”.
i just wonder if apple will go iphone style on the imac and macbook at some point in the future, reserving the full osx for the pro computers.
why? Because with mobileme, app store and itms, one could in theory have everything a desktop user would want, at home or on the go.
hell, if apple can get some kind of intergration between facebook and the mobileme calendar going, they may have a social computing winner!
microsoft and google have a lot to work on here.
its not for me, thats for sure. but for a lot of people out there, it will be a gift from god.
Early adopters need to worry, as with the Iphone and Ipod Touch, many discovered that just around the corner, the 32 GB version was just waiting to be released, once all the 8 and 16 GB are sold.
I will wait for the 32 GB, also the connection speed seems slow, on the N95 a site like Engadget loads quick.
I was expecting speeds nearing DSL, I thought that was the announcement made by AT&T a few weeks ago. According to AT&T they would deliver speeds of 15 to 20 times the current connection speeds offered.
from what i understand, there is a replacement program in place. anyone that got a iphone before may 27 can get theirs replaced with a 3G version free of charge…
apple is almost trying to hard to be customer friendly here…
Brook.
Those Arm9/Arm11 devices cant process detailed websites as fast as the data comes in on a 3g link. If you had a 10MB fibre conected to the iPhone, it wouldn’t be much faster!
AT&T are talking about raw HSDPA speeds but what the customer sees is something very different. This is why MIDs and UMPCs based on real general purpose processors, are much faster for web work.
Steve
and have a battery life to match ;)
“and have a battery life to match”
They need it….everything is so slow ;-)
The iPhone 3G isn’t impressive because of 3G and GPS. 3G is old news for most handsets and GPS is either currently being offered or will be offered in a number of new handsets.
What makes the iPhone 3G so impressive is the excitement that it brings to mobile computing. When Google says that better than 50% of searches originating from a mobile device are made from an iPhone, a device that had not been existence for a full year when they said that, then it’s time to take notice.
The iPhone will do more to improved the marketplace for Windows Mobile, Symbian and Linux based handsets than they have been able to do combined to date. It will grow demand and that will in turn grow the developer community to better engage web apps for mobile devices in general.
So do I intend to get a iPhone 3G? No. I want tethering, I want A2DP, I want removable media. I want software that I want, not what Apple says I may have. My next planned purchase will probably be a Treo 800w when it’s released in the next month or so. It also will have 3G and GPS and it won’t have a locked OS (so to speak). But I have no doubt that my experience with the 800W will be improved by the iPhone 3G’s very existence.
So thank you to all the lemmings who bought version 1.0 and lets here it for all the people who buy the new one. You’re making my day!
It0ll be intetresting in a year to see all this negative reaction…it’ll sank in Japan??? sales number will tell….
When iPhone 1 came out…we had the same negative comment…NO MMS….no 3G…it’ll never sell……a year later 6 million iPhone where sold…Apple is No.3 in Smart Phone sales (and they just started) and the 1st gen wasn’t even sold worldwide!!!
The Apple experience is something you can speak of ONLY if you have their stuff…not reading SPECS!!!!
Agreed yabeweb, from my point of view the only thing the original iphone lacked was 3g, and it will never be 32gb Brook as they use 16gb drives and 2 wont fit in there
Ill be buying at this price, bye bye Mid for me
I forgot to mention the fun factor as well
@Yabeweb
Smartphones never sell well in japan.. esp touchscreens with no physical keyboards
Japanese people can type a lot faster on a keypad than us..
it will sell better than all the other ones here but it’s won’t success not in apple terms
Oh if you READ my messages will see that I own a touch I also own a Nano/5G Ipod/17 Powerbook So I know Apple experience well ..
I have to agree with Stephen feger and would also like to thank the lemmings for buying version 1.0 ;-)
Steve thanks
I will wait for the 16GB N96 or a device like the everun with a refreshed hardware, with equal if not better battery life. I will not buy anything until they meet the minimum required to work a full day.
1-3G
2-Touch or some other way to input information
3-Slider keyboard or detachable.
4-Battery life 7-10 hours should not be that difficult.
5-I don’t need to edit Video or some other CPU intensive work.
6-What I need is a device that will carry me through a work day. Keep me connected to news and information without WiFi hotspot or WIMAX.
7-A Screen bright enough so if I walk outside I don’t have to find shade to see what I am working on.
In the past I would sacrifice one if not all my needs, today I will wait until all my needs are delivered on one device. Did I mention that I don’t really care about the OS, all my work and activity could easily be transferred from one OS to another.
Applications like Sugarsync and the newly announced MobileMe from apple make it easy to work OS independent.
“The Apple experience is something you can speak of ONLY if you have their stuff…not reading SPECS!!!!”
I agree with this. The real innovation of the phone is not its features, but the interface and the way everything works very well. I bought an N810 because it had more features than an iPod Touch, but it had a poor UI and weak implementation of much of its software. Then I picked up an iPod Touch and I couldn’t be more happy with it, it’s an incredible piece of software, than can’t be argued – coupled with the fact that the interface is so good, it is hard to beat.
People who have never used the iPod Touch of iPhone don’t have any idea how much better the capacitive touch screen is than a crappy passive screen on other devices.
Apple single-handedly introduced the concept of mobile internet to the general public. Sure its been around for years (Opera Mobile, Opera Mini, Pocket IE) but it has NEVER been simple enough and the experience is frustrating at best.
On the other hand, I picked up an iPod Touch, started Safari and found the browsing experience to be almost flawless. Flash would be nice but it is something I can live without. Speed is OK too.
Apple realised that people want webpages to look exactly the same as it does on their desktop and optimised the control interface, rendering engine and functionality to suit a small-screen mobile device. Look at Opera Mobile 9.5, its a blatant copy of Safari mobile and bears little resembelance to Opera Mobile 8.65.
Are there features missing on the 3G iPhone? Yes… but these features are of minor concern to most consumers.
Front facing camera… who cares! 3G video calls are very poor quality. Tried it once… no thanks.
Camera flash… 99% of camera “flashes” use LEDs which are useless.
Video recording… a feature I think I’ve used once in the last 6 months.
Expandable memory… pfft.. it comes with 16GB!!!
MMS… useless
Apple aren’t targetting the iPhone at power users. Quite clearly they are targetting the average Joe consumer AND business user. WM and RIM really need to up their game as there is no doubt Apple is going to take a much larger chunk of the smartphone pie.
Oh… and how does this relate to MIDs? If a typical consumer wanted Mobile Internet, would they rather a Gigabyte M528 (or Benq, or Abit, etc.. ) or the Apple 3G iPhone, which can also replace their phone? I wonder…
i do believe that opera was working on a interface refresh of 9.5 mobile before apple came out with the the iphone.
their betas for mini had a option to toggle between a mobile adapted view (something i find preferable ones if figure out where stuff end up on a page, or just want to read a article without all the add stuffed sidebars. but then i also find the print article option nice when using a full browser) and a normal layout, but with the text redone to fit the screen if your phone ones you zoom in on it.
and these betas where showing up when the first iphone was only a very insistent rumor a year ago. and for them not to use a similar system in their full mobile browser would be just silly.
what apple did was indeed to bring a mobile browser to the masses, at least the usa masses, but they did it by making the smartphone “sexy” (in much the same way as they present the “i am mac” as a “sexy” 20-something next to the 30+ something “pc”). but i cant help wonder if that was thanks to apple as a brand being “sexy” thanks to the impressive success of the ipod.
I still absolutely love my iPhone which I’ve been using close to a year. There’s no comparison when it comes to the interface.
Sure I wouldn’t mind MMS and video recording but most of the MMS’ I get are from friends who are sending crude porn anyway. As for video, well, I’ve been carrying around 3 high def cameras on me all the time, so I could live without it.
Will I upgrade to the 3G iPhone? Not right away.
Sure it sounds cheaper at $200/$300, but the data plan has been hiked up to $30 and it doesn’t come with 200 SMS text messages. So you’d probably end up paying around $40+ for the data plan alone.
Plus, I don’t even get 3g coverage in my area so the only advantage would be the GPS.
I will wait and see when the killer apps arrives. If there’s an app that really takes advantage of 3g and GPS, I may bite. Automatically geotagging photos would be nice.
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Can iPod touch have 3G nd why or why not