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Apple unveils iPhone 3GS 16GB, 32GB
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 9th June 2009
Apple's new iPhone 3GS comes with a number of hardware improvements, including a new graphics chip.
Dubbed the iPhone 3GS, the new model will come in both 16GB and 32GB capacities and will feature a number of hardware revisions over existing models. The big improvements are a new 3-megapixel camera that can record video at 30FPS, a digital compass, support for 7.2Mbps HSDPA, voice control options and a new OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics chip. Peer-to-peer networking is another of the big new features.
The battery life of the new model has also been improved, with up to five hours of continuous talk time, nine hours of WiFi access or 30 hours of audio recording.
O2 is the exclusive carrier for the new iPhone in the UK and will be offering the new iPhone at £440.40 for the 16GB 3GS and £538.30 for the 32GB 3GS on Pay As You Go contracts. Monthly plans are available on 18 or 24 month contracts and will get price reductions.
The existing 8GB 3G iPhone will get a price drop to £342.50 on PAYG and will be less than £100 on the lowest 18-month contracts, or for free on 24 month contracts.
Apple also took the time to give a release date for the new iPhone 3.0 firmware, which will be free for iPhone users and cost a small fee for iPod touch owners - look for it on June 19th.
Planning on picking up a new iPhone? Let us know in the forums and don't forget to check out our recent iPhone Games Round-up for some suggestions on the latest apps.
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So the original iPhone wasn't a massive innovation then?
I take it you have one?
Bah.
as for MMS; really, how many MMS messages have you sent in the past year? me: zero. email is free, and much more easy.
as for innovation? hardware is no longer important with devices any more. at the end of the day they're a dumb computer with a touchscreen. what's really exciting, and i do mean 'this gives me tingles' exciting, is the software, and frankly apple has really shown people how to launch a platform. the SDK, distribution model and ease of entry make it so easy to get started, which is proven by the amount of stuff on the app store. sure a lot of it is tat, but a LOT of it is also very, very good stuff.
This.
I picked up an iPod Touch for roughly £120 and, considering how much I use it, I consider it a fair price. For £540 though I'd expect a mobile phone to occasionally dispense jellybeans into my pocket.
We should be able to swing free upgrades because most mobile providers like to entice customers to stay.
So when you're looking for a new phone you think a gaming PC is a perfectly suitable alternative? I'd like to see how that works...
Yeah it was. Oooh two years ago. I'm not dissing the product, it's an excellently put together bit of kit, but since the launch they're now on the third itteration of the phone and have basically added nothing that wouldn't be standard features in many other phones. I think they've been quite deliberately avoiding making the iPhone as good as it could be because this way it prolongues the lifespan of the phone. Up next: a FOUR megapixel camera! Wow!
and yet it is still one of the most user friendly devices i have ever come across. only now companies are beginning to play catch up. why fix what was broken?
i am confused. where is this figure of £540 coming from? it starts at about £150 on contract. i understand you're rolling in the total cost of ownership over the course of the contract, but nobody uses the same pricing strategy when they talk about any other phone, simply stating that it is 'free on contract'. make up your mind, use one system or the other for pricing.
i'd also like to see you carry a PC, phone and mp3 player all in one pocket, and with a TCO of less than £540.
Yeah I agree with that, a 3megapix camera is wasted on me anyway. I've never taken photos with camera-phones they always look like pixelated crap. Copy and paste I cant see as any benefit to me what so ever. The new gfx chip, battery life and general speed boost all apply to me and I can't wait for those. Any other additions will be added bonuses.
The one thing I really want to see is a D-pad added. Then I could sell the PSP and DS and do some quality gaming.
What was so innovative about the original iPhone? Apart from the multi touch screen, there was nothing on the phone that couldn't already be found on phones a year old (and they only beat HTC to it by about a month).
Having said that, now they have included stuff that it should have had plus a bit more, I can see this phone doing very well.
I take it you have an iPhone or had at least a good amount of time alone with it to try and tell me its not innovative?
The amount
of dick we suckwe pay for the contract should give us an upgrade for nowt.On the other hand i cannot wait for os 3.0, roll on next wednesday! Tempted to get a mobile me sub too, the find my iphone feature looks pretty cool. I wonder how secure it is? Is it just a setting a cunning thief could turn off? Sending a sound to find your phone down the back of the sofa when its on silent is pretty sweet though!
what the iphone did was completely rework the interface for phones and in doing so made it ridiculously easy to use. a complete moron could do something like send an email, or load up google maps and find directions. now, we, as geeks, occasionally find this hard to appreciate. we have grown up with technology and almost take for granted that a little cumbersome tech is just par for the course. but it doesn't have to be this way! THAT'S what the iphone is innovative for. sure it left out some HUGE chunks of functionality in the first OS releases, but for apple to come to market, never having developed a mobile OS before, with such a downright accomplished and polished bit of software, that makes MS's winMo offering look laughably arcane in comparison, is an immense accomplishment.
...
For those who want or need one, great (I know my advisor will be all over this - he loves new Apple kit!) but the price tag is extreme. At least on PAYG.
...actually, I wonder what the uptake rate of PAYG iPhones has been? Anyone know?
Oh go on then, I thought for all of two seconds and came up with this. It has the benefit of actually having a usable camera with a real flash too.
The iPhone may or may not be better than that depending on what you want to do with your phone but to me there is no way an iPhone is 2.5x better especially when you're tied to one operator and only to apps approved by Apple.
SE Xperia X1 : Free on a £45 18month contract= 810
SE C905: Free on £35 18mth= 630
iPhone: Free on £35 24mth = 840 though the same £35 doesn't get you the same package
I expect the new iphone will be priced similarly to the old one maybe £50 or so more
edit: Just check the sim free price for the C905 and it ~£350 so the iPhone is a fair old bit more expensive.
Nother edit: just read this on the bbc and it looks like nearly £200 plus 18mths @ £35 = £830
as someone who has actually lived with both an n95 and an ipod touch for 18 months, i politely deride your comparison of an n82 to the iphone. there is a world of difference in usability. and don't get me started on the nseries PMP software.
The only negative comments are from those who don't have one. Knowledge is power as they say.
F*ck Apple!
Sure I know you can jailbreak the iPhone, but you risk problems with further updates & OS revisions. More to the point though, why should I have to put up with doing it in the first place? There's already a platform out there with great hardware, massive developer support and a committed community. Sure the interface isn't as good as the iPhone, but HTC have made great improvements - it's not far off.
The iPhone isn't a bad thing really, they did the same for the mobile phone market as they did with the portable media player market: came out with a product that was mildly innovative and was incredibly simple to use - this raised the bar, so everyone else had to double their efforts to keep up and stay competitive. The same is happening now with mobile phones (although I'm not suggesting Apple is the market leader in either sector).
http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/index.cfm?newsid=26245
For me, that's 6 months @ £35, plus the cost of a new phone + new 18 month contract. So that won't be happening.
TBH, the only thing in the new hardware I'd like is the voice over stuff. But Unless O2 change their minds and do something reasonable for upgraders, the free upgrade to OS 3.0 will do for me.
I have a touch and nearly everyone here has a full iPhone. Our collective response is still that it's too expensive. Sure, the iPhone is nice and all - but £540, seriously? It's not that good.
My negatives for the iPhone are pretty concise.
I want a physical button for call answering, or the ability to map the 'answer' function to the Home button.
I'd like the battery not to suck so bad.
Everything else is being addressed in 3.0, for me, so.. Eh.
the n97 recently went on sale for the sim free RRP of £700. you can get it PAYG for £500. i know which of the two i'd rather have.
We had that topic again and again in the past few months. WHY would any provider offer you a free upgrade path just because a new model is being released?!
As someone else pointed out: You don't get a new car for free when they release a new model of the one you own. And they never did that with phones either, UNLESS the first wave was faulty. Call the iPhone overpriced/overhyped/crap/whatever, but it's not faulty.
You want to be trendy? You want to have the latest gadget? You want to enlarge your iPenis? PAY FOR IT! That's how it's been since the invention of money and gadgets and that's how it'll stay until there is noone left on this or any planet.
I, personally, want an iPhone. I wanted it from the first day I saw it. But it was and is too expensive so I'll just wait for the 3G to drop like a stone price-wise [1-2 months after 3GS hits the shelves I guess] and grab that for a lot less than it is now.
That's the plan, at least. ;)
The real kicker has to be that Microsoft are going to charge $200 - $400 dollars to upgrade from a broken OS (Vista) to how it should of worked to a point with Windows 7. Where as Apple are going to charge people just $29 to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but I bet most people will be getting the cash out to pay for the upgrade they should be getting for free.
You work it out.
..What in the hell does that have to do with a phone?
Can you install either 7 or Snow Leopard on an iPhone? Nope.
"hey everybody! microsoft sucks! everything they ever did sucks! we pwn them! but did you see this exchange support? it's awesome isn't it! that's right, we rule!"
you work that one out.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Ha!
I have an ipod touch, which I hasten to add I bought solely so as to test some web code I was writing on mobile safari. I was hoping to get some secondary usage out of it as a data transfer and generic flash storage device, as well as an mp3 player, and I have to say it is quite the mos comprehensively useless pile of junk it's ever been my intense misfortune to waste £100 on. You can't just plug it in as a USB device and dump mp3s on it, oh no. You have exactly one PC where you can send stuff to it, you can't get stuff back off of it, and doing so involves the ridiculous chicanery of itunes and "syncing the device", which seems to be a precise analogue to "drag files onto USB drive", only with 50% extra free irritation and wasted time. You can't download web links onto it and you can't upload attachments to emails.
It's so nearly so good; the display is fantastic and the UI is apple's usual festival of attention to detail, but as a device? What an extravagant waste of space. The phones, I understand, are exactly the same thing with a GSM modem, and are presumably exactly as much of a chocolate teapot.
iThings - potentially brilliant, but hobbled at birth, railway-sleeper-and-mallet, "Misery" style, by ridiculous software decisions.
You can get the phones heavily discounted or free. Just get to the end of your contract, then phone the provider and say you want to leave.
Simples.
Joe, if you all think that the iPhone is too expensive, why do most of your colleagues own one? It's clearly expensive, but it's not TOO expensive. I think the iPhone is expensive, but worth it, unlike one of those diamond-encrusted phones by Armani or whoever, which are just expensive.
As an existing iPhone owner due an upgrade on O2, I'm interested to see if I'll get any kind of discount on the 3GS over what it would cost to establish a brand new contract. I doubt it, though. O2 don't seem to understand the spirit of the "upgrade", unlike competitors like T-Mobile, who have always been very kind to me.
Maybe those that are crying about the expense of PAYG need to downgrade their hopes to something more affordable from Nokia or whoever.
Technology journalists tend to have a penchant for technology and will tend to buy it no matter the cost, especially if it means they can answer email on the go easily and if it looks pretty like anything made by Apple. That's why they picked them up at launch in America for the most part and why it doesn't reflect at all on the cost-per-worth ratio. The only reason I got one was because I had a lot of GameStation vouchers and could cover the costs.
Think of everything else you could do with 540 pounds - which is more than half a grand. You could buy a lot of PC kit, mountain biking gear, car equipment, furiniture, games or beer for that money.
Ah right I thought we were talking about it like that because I didn't think for a second anyone would be daft enough to expect Apple/o2 to give them a free phone while still in an existing contract!
There aren't people out there that stupid are there?
:o
lol
I don't really think, though, that you're hitting the most damning point with the PAYG price. Other phones, like the Touch HD, go for comparable money on PAYG.
The real raw deal here is the high purchase price when bought on contract. £280 or thereabouts for the 32GB 3GS when bought with a £35 18-month contract. A question that O2 needs to answer here is: how can they charge £280 for a phone that costs just $299 in the US, when previously they charged £99 for the 3G, which cost $199 in the US at launch? Why the sudden decision to double their prices, relative to the US?
16GB (currently got 8gb and about 3/4 full with mp3's and developer videos, tonnes of apps ... not sure what I'll do with an extra 8gb)
600 mins/month
500 texts/month
£87.11 one off fee
£34.26 per month
Wow, extortionate!
Actually, give it a few more months to the end of my contract and I'll likely get that one off fee wiped off. BARGAIN!
02's twitter page mentions the need to buy yourself out of your existing conttract.
Ah, right, I'll just go bend over the nearest table, then.
Or.. Just stick with the 3G >.>
Either you are using a slow internet connection, or you are connected using plain band or 3G band.
Plain band is painfully slow on any phone.
3G is still painful on any phone but less so.
Wireless broadband connection is fast as I need for surfing and posting on forums, using Ebay, Facebook, streaming realtime stock prices to the phone, news updates, playing massively (albeit text based) multi player games ... I could go on and on but my point is that it sounds like you are not using it on broadband or if you are then blame the broadband connection not the phone.
Means I can stick with jail breaking and getting extra stuffs then. Also the £15/3GB is a rip when you consider that you already have unlimited data on the device itself. £7/3GB would be far more reasonable but phone companies are getting greedier and greedier all the fooking time!
from this one:
and this:
I take it you want to enlarge your iPenis too? :P
I was connected to the 3g. Wireless broadband is hard to come by over here, so basically if I can connect to it I am at home and that means my netbook makes more sense for internet use.
Ill stick with my HTC touch for texting and making phone calls.
although i will ONLY get one after it's been jailbroken. being in Apple's controlled space is like buying the best Alienware laptop and never play games on it.
so anyone know the actual spec changes? (i highly doubt the "longer battery life" claims are due to the new hardware, probably due to new OS, which will be avaliable across all phones)
Like that?
In all fairness, I don't see why anyone would bother with a PAYG phone anymore. Even my mum has moved on. If you use a phone enough to validate paying that kind of money, you are unlikely to be spending any less than £30, or at least £20, a month on credit anyway.
I honestly think the price is just for;
A) Apple to make as much money as possible by slowly updating the iPhone
B) Discourage people from buying one, jailbreaking it and using their own contract SIM from another company (or even from O2 themselves, but one more suited to the user that they wouldn't normally be able to get with the iPhone).
This hardware all adds up. If you want to talk about scandalous prices, try looking up the cost of buying some of these phones SIM-free - that is, totally un-attached to any network provider or any kind of contract/deal. A quick check on expansys.com finds the price of the iPhone 3G at £660 - that's the 3G, not the new 3GS. Now factor in a suitable contract from O2 or any other provider - with a data plan suitable for the iPhone - and you'll find the much vaunted TCO shooting through the roof. The reason that network providers can offer these phones so cheap, or even free, is that the cost of these phones are subsidised through the price you pay on contract - hence why SIM-only contracts are vastly cheaper and most contracts are now 18 months as standard (or even two years).
If you want the tech, you're going to have to put up with the shafting. Personally I'm quite happy to live with that, even if it means I sometimes have to pay a bit extra up front for the phone I want. Hell, I got my Mini 9 on a vodafone contract that I'm going to be stuck with for two years. But that's the price I have to pay for wanting a free netbook with a built-in mobile broadband adapter.
Great post BLC!
Apple haters make me laugh.
Heh, and I don't even own an iPhone or any Apple products ;) (except for an old 2GB iPod nano that never gets any use any more...).
True, but in those Sim-less prices you are paying a premium in order to get to a choice with your provider. It's no reflection on how much the iPhone actually costs to make.
Likewise, I could say the same about the Wii. The Wii has some fancy tech in it, compared to the rest of the market, and is similarly popular to a mass market. It has motion sensors, wireless controllers, flash storage and so on too (though it's also obviously not very high-end) - and yet Nintendo still make a profit on each Wii sold.
Point: The iPhone costs a lot and sure, on a hardware front it's nicely packed - but that doesn't mean it isn't too expensive for most people.
The point is that new phones have always been expensive on PAYG unless you choose a contract option or a cheap phone. This has always been the case and always will.
They can hardly reach 7.2 Mb/s in a lab, let's not even start talking about being out in town and trying to reach these speeds. Plus the network isn't developed yet.
And why is everyone bitching about Apple's prices? As long as they can sell 20m+ phones they found the right price. Success shows they're right even if many say they're not.
I agree with you on that one; my netbook can only reach speeds of around 2-3.5mbit in a city centre with full signal strength, even though the contract is advertised at 7.2mbit. I still think that this is an incredible achievement however; it wasn't that many years ago that I raved about being able to finally get 2mbit ADSL at home - now I get that everywhere I have a vodafone signal.