Apple Confirms 3G iPhone Launch

The long awaited Apple 3G iPhone has formally been announced by Steve Jobs at the WWDC developer show in San Francisco. Countering all the complaints about battery life - the new 3G iPhone will come with a standby time of 300 hours, which is comparable to the mainstream 3G smartphones on the market. Talktime in 3G mode is 5 hours vs 10 hours for 2G.

The new iPhone will be available in more than 70 countries later this year, beginning with customer availability in 22 countries - Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US - on July 11.

In its first year, the company sold a total of 6 million of the first release iPhone and it is effectively now sold-out. Recognizing though that according to their research, some 56% of potential consumers cited the price as a reason not to buy the phone, the company said that the new 3G model will be "more affordable".

Retail price for the new 8GB 3G iPhone in the USA will be US$199 - which compares to the US$599 when the original model was launched a year ago. The 16GB version will be sold for US$299. Consumers will be required to sign up for a new two-year contract with AT&T.

The handset also comes with built-in GPS, which is additional to the Wi-Fi based location service offered late last year.

"Just one year after launching the iPhone, weĆ're launching the new iPhone 3G that is twice as fast at half the price," said Steve Jobs, AppleĆ's CEO. " iPhone 3G supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync right out of the box, runs the incredible third party apps created with the iPhone SDK, and will be available in more than 70 countries around the world this year."

iPhone 2.0 software will be released in early July - and will be free for existing iPhone users. The upgrade will also include 60 days access to their new "mobileme" email and calendar platform which will eventually replace the older .mac service.

Since the company launched its software developer platform in March, there have been over 250,000 downloads (100,000 in just 4 days) and some 25,000 people applied to the paid professional platform. Of those, just 4,000 were accepted. The company has also worked with Cisco to include corporate VPN capability into the new iPhone OS, along with support for Microsoft Exchange. A beta problem had support from just over a third of the Fortune 500 companies - indicating strong corporate interest in the handset. Also for corporate users is the ability to deliver internally developed software applications without having to use the Apple shop as a delivery platform.

An interesting application has been shown which combines the phone book with the location aware services to filter available contacts by proximity to the user. 

A new application which they say will maintain a "persistent IP connection" to an Apple Push Server will be launched in September and allow applications, such as IM chat programs to continue to receive notifications even when disabled. Apple will however take a 30% cut of any revenues generated from such services.

Posted to the site on 9th June 2008