WWDC '08 Sees Slimmer, Improved, 3G iPhone

Many of us have been watching Apple's WWDC 2008 keynote unfold live. There are many exciting tidbits, but most of all is the announcement of the 3G iPhone. Featuring an even thinner profile, black plastic back, metal buttons, flush headphone jack, improved audio, GPS support, and improved battery life, this is bound to make quite a few people stand up and take notice. Update 18:54 GMT by SM: Best of all it looks like they really took the price point to heart, 8GB iPhones are now $199 and a 16GB model will be available for $299, coming to an Apple store riot near you on July 11,2008.

Comments

NOT slimmer

[partycrasher]

The iPhone 3G is NOT slimmer - not if you look at the depth. In fact it is a couple of mm's thicker than the predecessor The 3G tech spec page says Height: 4.5 inches (115.5 mm) Width: 2.4 inches (62.1 mm) Depth: 0.48 inch (12.3 mm) Weight: 4.7 ounces (133 grams Old tech spec: Height: 4.5 inches (115 mm) Width: 2.4 inches (61 mm) Depth: 0.46 inch (11.6 mm) Weight: 4.8 ounces (135 grams)

Re:Where's the meat?

[necro81]

Jeeze, which side of the bed did you get up on today?

The keynote did have a discussion of a standalone IM client, not based on SMS. It won't run as a background process, but rather rely on a new push service that Apple (and carriers I guess) are adding with the 2.0 firmware rollout. The push service is intended to be used for lots of things, not just IM-ing, and will be available through an API to all 3rd-party devs.

First-gen iPhones can already do some locating-aware stuff off of the location of cell towers. It ain't great - accuracy is to within a hundred feet at best in my experience, but it is good enough for some location-aware applications. It can already be used to tell you the nearest restaurants, etc., just not give you realtime directions, geotagging, etc. Why do you suddenly expect that the rollout of a next-gen iPhone would suddenly mean an upgrade in the hardware of your current iPhone? New hardware with new capabilities is the march of technology.

Improvements to the software will come out on a continuing basis. In addition to getting 3rd party apps (which as you say can fill in a lot of missing capabilities), firmware 2.0 on first-gen iPhones will give support for a lot of enterprise stuff (I don't know if that applies to you), support for iWork and MS Office file formats, push-everything, and access to MobileMe (all your stuff is in the cloud, and accessible from anywhere, and pushed to all your devices).

Re:Verizon

[LarsG]

EV-DO is a 3G flavor of CDMA, so no luck there.

As for Verizon "opening up" their network, that's a funny variety of newspeak. It is still more closed than any GSM carrier. Verizon's variety of "open" means that they are publishing specs and setting up a certification lab so that 3rd party manufacturers can make devices compatible with their network. You can't use any old CDMA phone and use it on Verizon, it has to be Verizon certified.

Compare to GSM, where you can take any unlocked phone, put in a sim-card from any GSM carrier you like and off you go. There is no need for the phone to be $cell_carrier_x certified, it is sufficient that the phone complies with the GSM spec.

The CDMA family is:
CDMA (2G) - CDMA2000 (2.5G) - EV-DO (3G) - UMB (4G)

The GSM family is:
GSM (2G) - EDGE/GPRS (2.5G) - UMTS (3G) - HSDPA/HSUPA (3.5G) - LTE (4G)