Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller today introduced the new iPhone 3GS, with the “S” standing for “Speed” at the Apple World wide developers conference in San Francisco.

There are multiple models of the new iPhone, as had been predicted. The 16GB will retail for $199. The 32GB model will sell for $299. Both will be available on June 19th. In addition, the current 8GB 3G phone will remain available for the reduced price of $99, beginning today, in a move that will almost undoubtedly bring a large number of new users to the iPhone.

The introduction of the newest Apple phone started, predictably, with a recap of how successful the previous iPhone models have been. In a neat segue from the OS 3.0 presentation which preceded the iPhone announcement, Schiller recapped the number of apps available for the major smartphone competitors: 50,000 apps on iPhone, 4,900 for Android, 1,088 for Nokia, 0,030 forBlackberry, and 18 for Palm. He joked that he could barely make out the Palm name on the list.

Schiller then proceeded to sing the virtues of the new Apple phone, going onto some detail about the new features and what they mean to the user. Among the features that he highlighted were the following:

The internals of the phone are all totally new, but the exterior remains the same, meaning that there is no front-facing video camera for videoconferencing.
It is over 2 times faster to launch the Messages app, 2.4 times faster to load The Sims, 3.6 times faster to load an Excel attachment, and almost 3 times as fast to load a large Website.
The new phone has a brand new camera, featuring tap-to-focus technology, automatic exposure and white balance control, automatic macro down to 10 centimeters, a switch to move between still and video mode, with 30 frame per second video at VGA resolution.
You can share the video right from your iPhone 3GS to YouTube, MobileMe, MMS, and email.
The 3GS features a voice control interface, which allows the user to hold down the home button and then speak commands directly into the phone. This voice command interface already works with phone mode, iTunes, and running apps from the iPhone dock.
As expected, the new phone has support for a virtual compass, which is fully integrated with Maps, allowing instant directional orientation.
The phone supports the Nike+ runners’ app, meaning that it has integrated support for FM radio, which should engendeer yet more radio apps.
The new phone supports data encryption, making it more suited to enterprise situations.
Allows easy remote data wipe for stolen phones, with encrypted iTunes restore if the phone is recovered.
Vastly improved battery life, with up to 9 hours of internet surfing, 10 hours of video, 30 hours of audio, 12 hours of 2g talk-time, 5 hours of 3g talk-time.

Between the pricing options and the new features, the three new iPhones will go a long way towards expanding an already large user base and insuring the future success of the iPhone for both business and pleasure use. The new phone, taken together with its new operating system, provided almost everything that advance rumors and hype led us to believe they would. It is a red-letter day for the iPhone, and a black day for the competition.

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Entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 5:24 pm under Internet, News, iPhone, iPod Touch.  Print This Post

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