International Mac Podcast

The iPhone is held in some households as a god on a dock of solid gold. Or so I have heard. Now their is a new JesusPhone and it is much improved.

Steve Jobs on stage at the WWDC 2008 stage and all ears were tuned to the iPhone frequency. People lay outside bearing arms if Steve let them down but fortunately he did not.

Mr Jobs first celebrated the iPhone EDGE’s birthday. As a loving parent does he boasted about what his baby had accomplished in his first year. 90% customer satisfaction with 98% of people satisfied with the iPhone web browsing.

So far 6 million iPhones have been sold. Apple say they know what it is that people want but do they….. His holly appleness proceeded along to list some of the things that iPhone luva’s have wanted for a long time, including.

1. 3G!
2. Enterprise Features
3. Third Party Applications
4. More Countries
5. More Affordable

Apple has addressed the 3rd party applications and also the enterprise features in the software part of the presentation and for more information on that see this post.But what about the other things on that list. Well Steve satisfied the cravings of geeks around the world and today they are today announcing the iPhone 3G.

Mostly it is the same hardware. They have the same screen, camera and basic look to the front but the back is slightly different. It is just like the curved plastic backs we have seen previously. It also has, which makes me happier than Mr Brightside, a flushed headphone jack so that all standard headphones will work with it without any adaptors. It does seem like they have learnt from their mistakes.

3G will of course provide better download speeds. Comparing 2 sites the Jobsinator says that it takes 59 seconds on edge and 21 seconds on 3G. Approaching the “zippy” 17 seconds of WiFi. They have also done great things with the battery in this model. Having 300 hours of standby time and 10 hours of 2G talk time, suggesting that their will be an option to turn off the 3G data downloads. This was the main concern with the iPhone being 3G and if Apple are correct with their data then we should be ok.

Also a big feature that people have been crying out for is GPS and Apple have included this and they the iPhone is taking a big step towards being about location aware applications. There were demos of applications that depended on people being able to see where they are. Apple sell the phone in only 6 countries currently and they set themselves the target of 12 for the iPhone 3G and at a stretch 25.

They ended up at 70. It’s an iPhone world after all.

The next step they wanted to tackle was pricing. Now we are not going to go into the pricing too much here look for a post later when we have more details of the prices in different countries. The iPhone 8GB will be $199 and that will be the highest price the world over for that device and we mean with conversion rates as well. The 16GB will be $299 and that will have an optional white version. It will have, as far as we can tell, worldwide rollout on July 11th so add the date to your upcoming.org.

Today was a day of many tissues some of tears of joy, some of sorrow for the loss of a further $199 from peoples pockets and the other tissues were for the people who got really exited by the new device. Safe to say, the Jobtopian company has done it again.