Crunchgear has posted pics that they believe are a real ad for the upcoming 3G iPhone, revealing the much discussed video conferencing feature many have been anticipating. Recent patents filed by Apple corroborate this evidence. In addition to showcasing a Product (RED) version, the ads also suggest the release of iChat for Windows. It also appears that the new firmware will support UMTS/HSDPA, as expected.
Is This The New iPhone?
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Adam Scheinberg
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If this is in fact true, I’m there on release day.
Maybe if I put all my Christmas money together. Pretty sure Globe Telecom won’t bother releasing the 1st gen iPhone here, given how much they invested in 3G infrastructure.
the red phone is missing the lock button, or whatever that button is, in the pics…
Even if they’re fake, they’re a very respectable good estimate of what may be shown anyway. They follow very much the style of change from the 5.5G iPods to the iPod Classic (anodised style). I’d be happy to entreat these as real.
My question: When will they be in the UK? And will the tarrifs not reek of 5 years ago?
P.S. Where’s my bluetooth sync and bluetooth modem, eh??
Edited 2008-06-07 17:10 UTC
Apple has to have something to add for the third gen, ne?
The iPhone isn’t a product that Apple has just released into a market of unsuspecting carriers. Apple did both a good thing and a bad thing going to the carriers first.
Apple has the balls to get the carriers to listen to them. That’s why Apple got the carriers to implement Visual Voicemail (at their expense); but the carriers also have the weight to get Apple to do what they want. There must have been massive fighting and backroom arguments over the carrier’s RIAA-style requests, and Apple wanting to make their vision.
No MMS? Crappy camera? No bluetooth Sync, no bluetooth modem?, no bluetooth obex? You can bet the lack of these are not because Apple couldn’t do them, but because the carriers were so *afraid* of the iPhone they wanted to stunt it as much as is possible by using their sheer monopolistic weight.
It’s the very same thing when the RIAA demanded DRM on iTunes and other partners because they feared what was not their own. It’s why BluRay is stuffed full of DRM, even delaying the PS3 for months. It’s why HDMI and HDCP mean that an incredibly small %age of expensive PCs are only just now capable of playing BluRay content at native res, when high-res screens have already been around since 2000.
I have before called the iPhone a joke in the UK, and it is clear that the success of the iPhone, even in its crippled state is going to strike such fear into the carriers and the competition that they are going to lash-out in blind fear.
Remember what the Creative CEO said about the iPod Shuffle?
Where’s Creative now?
Heck, remember what Creative said about the original iPod?
I really clearly foresee that AT&T, RIM and many more will be reduced to pathetic nervous wrecks just like Creative because they can not see beyond the iPhone.
And I don’t think that’s a good thing; that the competition fails to understand its customers so much that features can be taken away from us and may never return, because there’s no competition to fight for us.
My Sony w810i is a product, put onto the market, for use on a carrier. It has a full compliment of bluetooth services
The iPhone is a long list of backroom deals. It will not, nor ever in my current opinion, have a full set of bluetooth services, because that could allow customers to use the very cell-network they’re paying to access, in ways that said backroom deals do not approve of.
The idea of P2P and VOIP apps “leaking” onto AT&Ts network literally keep them up at night. Apple’s AppStore-only gateway for apps is yet one more backroom deal that’s crippling the device.
I do not see this changing, even if things improve on Monday.
Edited 2008-06-07 18:24 UTC
Never owned a phone that did MMS or had Bluetooth. Presumably Apple could add MMS in a firmware upgrade.
Still on the fence. Might just get an iPod touch and keep my current Nokia brick.
Step out of the RDF for a second and the obvious explanation might occur to you: Apple couldn’t get those features ready in time for launch (or they couldn’t be bothered to), but they released anyway, knowing that they would have no shortage of apologists from the legions of “Apple-can-do-no-wrong” fanbois.
Clearly someone can’t see beyond the iPhone, but it doesn’t appear to be AT&T or RIM…
I seem to be missing something obvious in your post. Why would the carriers care if you use a Nokia, Samsung or Apple phone on their network. Surely all they care about is that you use their network lots and lots and rack up huge bills. Shouldn’t the hardware you use to rack up these bills be secondary to them?
The carriers ‘let’ every other phone maker in the world have these features, why wouldn’t they let Apple. I genuinely don’t get it.
My current Nokia phone came with VoIP built in and my carrier was happy to not only let me buy it, but even subsidized the cost of the phone. So some carriers obviously seem to be sleeping well enough at night.
http://www.aboyandhiscomputer.com/images/Announcing_the_Apple_iProd…
Edited 2008-06-07 18:29 UTC
If they are indeed fake, we’d see countless cease-and-desist lawsuit stories all over the net by now, or a few hours time
But seriously, the pics look nice, and fake or not, like said above, It’s a good estimate.
However, they’re likely to be informed fakes.
People were divulging information about the test mules before the iPhone was originally released but there was also information on the real design floating out there. No one believed that it was true. The test mules were more like real phones, so people thought small and accepted that kind of design.
I believe that AT&T had all kinds of reservations in accepting a fully capable iPhone when they started because they were afraid that other phone makers would pull out and they’d be stuck with only Apple products and that Apple would dictate what AT&T could do. So, Apple voluntarily left out some items.
Of course, the real test is to see how many people will be disappointed by the lack of 3G data service in the U.S.A. The Europeans and Asians should be happy because it looks as though UMTS and HS*PA is well supported. I looked at the coverage maps for AT&T and the data map looks fine but they don’t differentiate 3G and EDGE. If you click the Mobile TV link, you see a more interesting view of 3G. A lot of people may hate Sprint, but at least, they have 3G data access available over a lot of this rather large country.
My question is: Will Apple bring their bigger-than-a-phone-smaller-than-a-computer slate-like device to the party this year?
3G coverage is Sprint’s only saving grace, though now that I live in a larger city, so I can pretty much get 3G from anybody that offers it, so now I have less reason to subscribe to Sprint’s crappy service. Hopefully 4G will get rolled out in a nicer fashion, though with the way the population density is in the States, it’ll never be as good as Europe or Asia.
Well, I’ve generally had good service from Sprint and from my informal surveys, AT&T and Verizon don’t do better. T-Mobile does better but doesn’t have great coverage and Alltel was swallowed by Verizon.
If AT&T are allowed to subsidize iPhone and you can buy one otherwise, the big question is “will it be unlocked?” That would help adoption, as long as T-Mobile can support data services, even if they’re only on EDGE. The lack of trouble to have an unlocked phone would be huge.
The articles speaks of UTMS, but it’s UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System). Also check http://www.nieuwemobiel.nl/Begrippenlijst/Umts.html for more indept info.
Meh.
Speaking as the current owner of a Treo 650, I would give major parts of my anatomy for a Treo powered by the iPhone OS – or an iPhone that exhibits the attention-to-detail that Palm has put into the Treos.
I find it incredibly maddening that – despite the fact that Apple now sells their own smartphone – Palm still provides a more “Apple-like” experience with the Treo when it comes to basic usability. And yet Apple has a modern, technologically-advanced handheld OS – while Palm is still making-do with an OS that was outdated 5 years ago.
Well ive been using the iphone since december and it’s the first mobile phone i haven’t wanted to chuck against a wall. Ive owned a Nokia E60, ok keyboard but email and surfing the network was an unstable PITA, it has 3G but the phone just poorly implements features, it was supposed to be a blackberry killer.
Ive owned sony’s P900, P910i, K500. Oranges SPV range and blackberry’s.
Stability wise the blackberry was probably the best of the bunch, but i didn’t like the web browsing implementation, really this is an email device. The rest were unstable and poor implemented, the worse being the orange SPV’s, which would continually crash when recieving, making calls and texts.
As for media no phone comes close to the ease of use and abilities of the iphone.
The iphone is stable and well implemented. Ive never had the phone crash, ive had the very odd safari crash, but it simply closes itself, to which i reopen it.
Personally ive never used MMS that much as i tend to send a lot of emails. I do also send text’s but these are usually only quick first responses.
The new iphone is interesting, however im not bothered either way as i am very happy with the iPhone. 3G would be nice but it’s not the end of the world as ive found edge on O2 quick enough to surf various web sites. GPS again sounds interesting but i doubt i would use it that much. This is not to say that i wouldn’t say no to one, i would of course upgrade (as i would like more capacity for music / video), however what im really saying is that im not in any rush to.
However even if you like the iphone or not, one thing it has done, is to get the phone and carriers to think carefully about phone hardware and software design.
I just want to know when this is coming out. I been waiting forever for the new ps3 and iphone.
iChat for Windows? As long as it does MSN, I’m in. No MSN, and I’m out, just like the rest of The Netherlands.
Pretty much the rest of the world more like it; the only people I have on my AIM list are from the US; the rest use MSN. MSN has pretty much become synonimous with instant messaging.
(I’m surprised almost nobody noticed Windows iChat up to this point)
Since iChat also uses Jabber, you could connect to MSN via transport…yeah, a bit cumbersome (and will give you only text messaging). It seems I should be almost glad that here, in Poland, local IM network dominates; absolutelly shitty one so its share of the market is beeing slowly eaten by Jabber and…Skype (well, it’s better in comparison)
I almost could be interested with iChat…supposedly its audio and video capabilities are really good? Unfortunatelly it’ll almost certainly come with tons of Apple crap and no interoperability with Linux IM clients… (I’m thinking here about whole package: text, VoIP, video)
Skype video too often works too poorly… (audio too, when not on perfect connection)
Oh well, I still don’t want to give up hope for Google Talk…ends up with best audio quality on poor connections and is totally no-nonsense (both things come in handy when one wants to talk with somebody computer illiterate). Jingle (Gtalk VoIP library) compatible Linux clients are also coming…if only Google would add video to Gtalk – it’s IMHO the only thing that’s missing from it to be…perfect as a simple, accesible IM. And I guess I’m convinced that Google would implement video correctly (as in: high fps and good synchronisation takes priority on “bad bandwith day” over high resolution or colours)
I think those pics are fake because of:
– Knowing Apple, they would have without a doubt “ordered” that web site to remove the pics or else (“we are going to sue you”)
– That Apple logo on the back of the phones, the colors look weird. Not something that Apple would use in my opinion.
I could be wrong, time will tell.
With all eyes in the mobile world on Apple this week I thought I thought the time was right to talk about what we believe is the best way to conduct a mobile web search on a device like the iPhone^aEUR|a device with a rich, full screen, touchscreen only. Namely: Voice search. You say it, our speech recognition (running on a server) produces text, the text automatically dumps into the search engine that^aEURTMs the subscriber^aEURTMs choice (Google, AOL, MSN, etc.), the search engine returns results. Or via voice, search for any content from your local iTunes playlists.
Using the Apple developer kit, we^aEURTMve been hard at work developing impressive technology that make the iPhones capabilities even more powerful. Voice search. Song search and selection. At the touch of a button and simply by saying the word. Over the next few days ^aEUR“ as the excitement mounts for the WWDC ^aEUR“ we^aEURTMll be sharing more and more details here on our blog. For now though, I think all of us should sit back, relax and enjoy the show.
Of course, we believe the most powerful use of speech would be running on the iPhone itself (vs a remote server) and made available to the developer community via iPhone^aEURTMs SDK APIs.