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Apple announces 3G iPhone

by on10 June 2008

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$199, GPS and same lame camera


Apple has finally launched its 3G iPhone and the new toy will be twice as fast for half of price. It will sell for $199 with AT&T's two-year contract and it will be available on July 11th. The white or black 16GB will launch a bit later at $299 with the same contract. 

3G will definitely speed up browsing but it will set your battery life back. In 3G mode the talk time sinks to 5 hours while with the new battery you can expect 10 hours in 2G mode in which you can watch up to 7 hours video, listen to 24 hours of audio or surf up to 5 to 6 hours on the high speed lane. Beware that these numbers are best-case scenario and Apple didn’t say the capacity of its battery. 

The new device is thinner and 2 grams lighter. It is 4.5-inches (115.5mm) in height, 2.4-inches (62.1mm) in width, 0.48 inch (12.3mm) in depth and it weighs 4.7 ounces, or 133 grams.

The old iPhone was 115 x 61 x 11.6 mm, which means that only the width actually changed and the phone got a bit thicker and 2 grams lighter. The display stays the same, but you don’t need anything better than the current one. It is still a 3.5-inch diagonal widescreen with multi-touch technology with 480x320 pixel resolution with 163 ppi.

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iPhone 3G also gets GPS support and a 3.5mm standard headphones jack which will definitely widen the choice of available headphones and potentially even headsets.

The iPhone 3G will simultaneously launch in 22 countries on July 11 including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, U.K. and, of course, the United States.

The phone comes in black with 8GB and 16GB memory and with the 16GB as the white one. Apple also decided to add a SIM ejector tool and if you ever had an iPhone you would know how useful this small thing might be.

The camera stays at 2Mpixel and it doesn’t look that there will be video support, which is very lame for a 2008/2009 phone. Now a French capital-named girl needs to buy another small video camera with night vision, and we had hoped that she should be happy with iPhone 3G. Steve Jobs what have you done? Now she will be sad.

The iPhone 3G supports many languages, including English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish.

If you were not satisfied with international keyboard and dictionary support the new 3G iPhone will have support for English (U.S.), English (U.K.), French (France), French (Canada), German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean (no dictionary), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish.

Now, that is a good start, but many countries will still miss its letters and dictionaries. App store is the Apple’s rip off from a famous Installer application and App store will make Apple even ritcher; but end users will get more third-party programs for their iPhones.

The iPhone brings many business features, such as exchange support, better calendar synchronization and many other tools to try to go after Blackberry, which we still don’t think will happen. iPhone is a nice toy but not a serious emailing device, we had a Blackberry-like device and an iPhone and we can tell.

GPS brings navigation to an iPhone and can now tell you the real directions via GPS, via Wi-FI or cell tower location technology. Maps on iPhone shows you live traffic information, indicating traffic speed along your route in easy-to-read green, red, and yellow highlights.

At the same time Apple warns that Maps, directions, and location information depend on data collected by third parties, and by that we believe they mean Google.

So except for the lame camera without flash or video support we think Apple did quite a good job with the new iPhone. Another lame one is that it doesn’t really look much different and many people won’t notice if you have fatter or thinner one, unless you get the white one.

The specs and some pictures are here.

 

 

Last modified on 10 June 2008
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