Apple announced iPhone 3G yesterday in a keynote by Steve Jobs at the WWDC in San Francisco. It will be available in the UK on the 11th July.
New features include:
- 3G-capable. 2.8 times faster than EDGE.
- GPS built-in
- Thinner
- Better battery life – 300 hours of standby, 2G talk-time 10 hours (as opposed to 5), 5 hours of 3G talk-time (competition is 3 hour 3G talk time), 5 to 6 hours of high-speed browsing, 7 hours of video, 24 hours of audio.
- Flush headphone jack
Other new features are:
- contact searching
- complete iWork document support
- complete Office document support (now includes PowerPoint)
- bulk delete and move for Mail
- save images you receive
- scientific calculator in landscape mode
- parental controls
- language
I wonder if the Keynote (iWork) and PowerPoint support also allows you to show the presentation via an AV cable in the same way you can do at the moment with video and images.
It will be interesting to see also if iWork (or even Office) support includes editing and creating support, or is it just going to be reading, I suspect the latter.
Of course there are also all the features announced when the iPhone SDK was released earlier this year which include:
- Exchange and ActivSync support
- Applications
- VPN
I do like the fact that an educational institution can put apps on the iPhone (or the iPod touch) without needing to go through the Apple checking process and the iTunes App store.
Downside is that you now need to activate the phone in store, so now unlocking just became a lot more expensive as you will have to buy into a phone plan as well as the phone.
Another downside for me is the fact they didn’t upgrade the camera. I was hoping for at least a 3 mega-pixel as I don’t think 2 cuts it compared to other phones. Also why no video capabilities? When I ask my students if they would consider buying an iPhone their number 2 reason (after cost) is lack of video. On the upside O2 have announced they will offer it on pay-as-you-go which is nice for those of us who don’t want to be tied in to an 18-month contract. And even with the downsides I’ll still probably make this my first iPhone.