Apple held it's Worldwide Developers' Conference in San Francisco yesterday and unveiled the oft rumored and now official iPhone 3G with GPS alongside new price structures and a "push service for the rest of us" to mimic the effectiveness of Microsoft Exchange packaged as MobileMe.

Over the course of several posts I will look to describe the myriad of new features and services unveiled at the first ever sold out WWDC starting with the software feature set of the new iPhone 2.0 software.

As Jobs explained in his keynote address there were several key factors the folks in Cupertino were hoping to address in the new updated iPhone. These included:

• 3G + GPS
  
• Enterprise Support
  
• Third Party Applications
  
• More Countries
• Lower Price

They have nailed them all down tight and then some.

3G + GPS

The new 3G iPhone provides a faster data download rate (about 2.5 times faster) while preserving battery life - setting a new standard in both 3G content delivery speed (with iPhone being 36% faster than other popular smart phone devices) and allowing for up to 5 hours of 3G talk time on a charge. That nearly doubles the industry standard of just under 3 hours.

The 3G iPhone also has built-in GPS which combined with Location Services in the SDK will allow developers to create incredibly rich location-based native applications for the iPhone 3G.

Enterprise Support

The iPhone 3G now includes support for Enterprise customers by tackling the following feature set:

• Push email
• Push calendar
• Push contacts
• Global address list
• Cisco IPsec VPN
• Certificates and Identities
• WPA2 / 802.1x
• Enforced security policies
• Device configuration
• Remote wipe

More about these features in future posts.

Third Party Applications

Perhaps the biggest story will be the full featured native application development via the App Store and the developer toolset Apple provides for iPhone development. This feature-rich intuitive platform unleashes incredible potential for an explosion of applications on the iPhone which I am eager to see released over the coming year.

The current applications under development and set to release July 11 when the phones become available are mind blowing. From Monkey Ball (SEGA) to medical imaging applications the iPhone base OS is giving developers an unrivaled handheld platform for rich applications development.

More Countries

The iPhone 3G will be available in 70 countries. Current iPhones are available in only six. There are twenty five countries slated for rollout the day 3G becomes available:

1. Australia
2. Austria
3. Belgium (French)
4. Belgium (Dutch)
5. Canada (English)
6. Canada (French)
7. Denmark
8. Finland
9. France
10. Germany
11. Hong Kong
12. Ireland
13. Italy
14. Japan
15. Mexico
16. Netherlands
17. New Zealand
18. Norway
19. Portugal
20. Spain
21. Sweden
22. Switzerland (French)
23. Switzerland (German)
24. UK
25. USA

Lower Price

$199 (say no more.)

This entry was posted by e, on Tuesday, June 10, 2008. You can leave your response.