- Photo: Gizmodo
It may not be everything many people were hoping for, but Apple announced a new iPhone Monday at WWDC, the iPhone 3GS.
“The S stands for speed,” said Phil Schiller, Apple CIO, telling the keynote crowd, “It’s the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet. What’s inside is entirely new. It’s a REALLY fast iPhone. Everything you do will have incredible speedups.”
The new hardware looks very similar to the current 3G model, but sports a 3 megapixel autofocus camera with video capability.
The new camera is not forward-facing as many hoped it might be, but its autofocus features a cool tap-to-focus functionality. Tap on the part of the photo you want to focus on, and it automatically focuses to that point of the image. It also automatically handles exposure and white balance. It’s got better low-light sensitivity and an auto-macro feature, with the ability to focus on things as close as 10cm away.
The phone’s camera application has a switch that swaps between still photo and video mode, supporting 30FPS, VGA with audio, auto-focus, auto-white balance and auto-exposure.
Other performance upgrades include:
- voice control: “Call Scott Forstall” — if there is more than one entry, it will ask which one you want (i.e. home, office, etc) — or for the iPod function: “play The Killers”
- digital compass: the compass app shows your orientation, has integration with Maps — if you double click, the map will reorientate itself
- new accessibility options — VoiceOver for content and controls, zooming, color inversion, mono audio, etc.
- instant remote wipe
- encrypted iTunes backups
- business friendly data encryption
- promised improved battery life. The iPhone will now get 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, which, if true, is a major upgrade.
The iPhone 3GS will be available June 19th in two models: $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB. The existing 8GB 3G model will remain available and sell for $99 beginning today.
