Apple releases 3G version of iPhone, price drops by half while speed doubles

Apple's annual WWDC 08 Global Developers Conference opened today in San Francisco, USA. At the opening speech, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the second generation of iPhone - the iPhone 3G.

As the name suggests, the biggest update for the new version of the iPhone is support for 3G networks, which reportedly is 2.8 times faster than the previous generation. In terms of appearance, Apple has not made many changes; from the front, it looks almost identical to the previous model. The changes in detail include: a reduced thickness to 12.3mm, the back cover adopting a curved design and switching from metal material to plastic, while the side buttons have been changed to metal material. A 16GB version will also be available with a white back cover. The headphone jack is located on the top surface, eliminating the issue of headphones not being able to be inserted properly. Additionally, the sound quality design of the phone has been improved.

The iPhone 3G supports tri-band UMTS/HSDPA, quad-band GSM/EDGE networks, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, and built-in A-GPS (GPS navigation + base station positioning). It features a 3.5-inch screen with a resolution of 480x320, a 2-megapixel camera. The standby time is 300 hours, 10 hours of 2G call time, 5 hours of 3G call time, 5-6 hours of web browsing, 7 hours of video playback, and 24 hours of music playback. It significantly increases supported languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other Asian languages, and also supports handwriting input (the first generation iPhone can also support this through an upgrade to firmware version 2.0). The overall dimensions are 115.5x62.1x12.3mm, weighing 133g.

For more details and iPhone 2.0 pictures, please refer to this article.