Seeing as I am due for an upgrade on my mobile phone contract later this year, I feel I had to write about the new eagerly awaited Apple iPhone. I have heard from a couple of people that the iPhone left much to be desired as a business orientated PDA. Although I still salivate thinking about the Kyocera EOS. For the time being I will just have to let those be dreams.

I was looking at different phones available on the market now. My main motivation for giving the iPhone a skip, was all the bits Apple forgot to add to the OS for the iPhone, but we will get to that a little later.

Apple announced the next iPhone. they’re dubbing it the iPhone 3GS. So what does the S stand for? Speed, says Apple. At face value it looks a lot like the current iPhone 3G, but Apple says it will be able to perform many of its functions “up to” two times faster.

On board is a new 3-megapixel camera with autofocus and improved low-light sensitivity. It now has a special macro mode, along with automatic white balance and exposure. Beyond that, it’s able to capture video at 640 x 480 at 30 frames per second. If you want to edit that video, there’s a new video editing app included, letting you trim clips using multi-touch control.

Another welcomed improvement is extended battery life. Apple says the iPhone 3GS will last nine hours using WiFi, compared to six hours before, will play video for 10 hours, up from seven hours with it’s predecessor . You’ll get 30 hours of audio playback is opposed to 24, and 12 hours of talk time on 2G instead of 10 hours, but 3G talk time is the same at five hours.

iPhones will be offered in three different flavors: a 32GB model, a 16GB, and an old 3G 8GB iPhone (with the new OS) will still be available. Now what the cost of these will be in SA is still a mystery. The new models will be for sale starting June 19 in the States. The guys at Cellucity tell me that South Africa should get the phones a month after they go on sale in the USA but we know how things can go with Apple. So I think it would be safe to say we will have them closer to the end of the year.

Remember the pesky problems with the OS I mentioned. Well the iPhone OS 3.0 finally introduces lots of features (that should have been in the software from the beginning). Including cut/copy/paste, a landscape keyboard that works in e-mail, notes and messages. There is also a multimedia messaging service (MMS).

Another innovation is Spotlight. Adding the ability to search across the iPhone, including inside apps and email. Another favorite feature of the jailbreakers is tethering, finally making its way to the iPhone. Letting you hook up your iPhone’s mobile broadband connection to a PC.

There is also a newly announced “find my iPhone” capability, but it will only be offered to Apple’s $99/year “MobileMe” customers. It’s a great idea, though, with a web browser showing you where your lost phone is on a map. You can get your phone to make a noise, even if you left it in silent mode. If you can’t find it after all that helpful technology, you can nuke all the data on that phone with a “remote wipe” command. Lucky enough to find it? Then you can restore it from a backup in iTunes.

Hopefully the ZestCulture team will be sporting iPhone 3GS soon & we are all hoping it is all it’s cracked up to be. Fingers crossed!

Via Apple & Dvice

I was just informed that the Rock, paper, Scissors tournament to be held at Neighbourhood has been moved to next Thursday 14 May. Will keep you all updated on what is happening.