FeediPhone 3G Announced For Release July 11th
Written by NetBear on June 9, 2008 – 1:37 pm -Geeks everywhere have held their breath waiting for the news. Today Steve Jobs announced that the new 3G iPhone will go on sale in 22 countries July 11th.
The new phone includes faster 3G network support, built-in GPS and a whole bevy of new features as part of the iPhone 2.0 software upgrade also due in July. Apple also lowered the price to $199 for the 8GB model and $299 for the 16GB.
While the new iPhone 3G doesn’t look too terribly different from the original iPhone, it does have a few hardware differences:
- Faster 3G network support.
- Built-in GPS. The first iPhone did pseudo-GPS using cell tower triangulation. But the 3G iPhone will have true GPS built-in. The new software will use GPS to do photo geotagging, live map updating and other features.
- A flush headphone jack. (Hazzah!)
- Dramatically improved audio.
- Slightly larger dimensions of 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3 mm, as opposed to 115 x 61 x 11.6 mm and 135 g for the original iPhone.
- It’s slightly lighter though: 133 grams vs. 135 grams for the original.
- All plastic black back-plate, white available for the 16GB model. This is probably why it is still lighter than the original which had a metal back-plate.
Other than these features, there isn’t a whole lot of difference hardware-wise in the 3G iPhone. The rumored second camera, video conferencing and iPhone Mini did not surface this time around.
The version 2.0 iPhone software does enhance all the iPhones substantially.
- Enterprise support, full Exchange support including push email / contacts / calendars, auto-discovery, global address book and remote wipe.
- Searchable contacts.
- Growing developer network creating games and custom applications which will be distributed to consumers through an Apple App Store.
- Full iWork document support.
- Full Office documents (Word, Excel, and now PowerPoint) support.
- Bulk delete & move for messages.
- The ability to save images you get sent in email.
- A new calculator with scientific mode when you rotate the iPhone.
- Parental controls.
- Tremendous language support.
The 3G network substantially speeds-up the iPhone’s ability to load Internet data. It’s 2.8X faster, approaching WiFi speeds. When compared to other 3G phones (Nokia N95 and Treo 750) the iPhone is 36% faster.
Battery times were impressive considering the 3G network support. Apple boasted 300 hours of standby, EDGE talk-time now has 10 hours (as opposed to 5), 5 hours of 3G talk-time (most phones only have 3 hour 3G talk time), 5 to 6 hours of high-speed browsing, 7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio. Not bad!
For the closer selling-point, Apple did lower the price of the 8GB model to $199 and the 16GB to $299. That will substantially lower what Apple said was the biggest barrier for people wanting iPhones.
Of course, Mr. Jobs didn’t announce was that 3G access would cost users an extra $30 a month from AT&T. DOH! But in the name of über-geekiness, that’s small pickin’s when we can load our favorite web sites (like Bearotic) faster on the go. 