New iPhone Looms at Apple’s WWDC
Update!: Credible images and details have leaked onto the innerwebs! Hit the “more” jump below to see!
Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference is set to begin this Monday, bringing months of speculation to a head involving long circulating rumormongering about the next iPhone. A number of features are expected to be included in the next version of the Jesus Phone, but the sure fire bullet point involves 3G.
For those of you who’ve saved yourselves countless hours by not speculating on the subject matter, we’ll be happy to play catch up with you. Previously, the iPhone has used the EDGE network for data transmission. Which is a smarmy acronym for Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution. If you’ve used Safari on an iPhone before, you probably have found the download rates passable, but a far cry from the speed of much higher connections that you may be used to at school, work, or possibly at home. 3G connections on the other hand, can hit speeds of around 14.4Mbit/s on the downlink. For some comparison and context of high lightning quick that is, test out your own connection right now and compare.
Don’t worry, we’ll wait on you.
Okay, got it? Yeah, you probably get the idea by now. If you live in the U.S., you might find that the lack of widespread implementation of the 3G protocol is pretty shameful when you consider how long our friends overseas have had it. Japan has even had it as far back as 2001. But thankfully, Apple will hopefully spearhead the acceptance of 3G once the new iPhone releases with it as a standard. And at this point, it’s pretty much a given. Analysts have even gone as far as to say that Apple would be effectively stupid to not at least announce the speedier phone at WWDC, with everyone expecting it and other signs pointing that way. For example, there’s the mysterious overseas containers Apple ordered, or ATT&T’s recent upgrade.
The sold out WWDC event begins Monday morning, and you should have no problem finding live blogs on any tech or Apple blog. We’ll provide a wrap up here that afternoon here, be sure to drop by our Science & Tech forum and hash it out then if you have a fancy to do so!
Update: Crunchgear has received some credible imagery which appears to be some future AT&T promotional material for the iPhone. Video chatting via WiFi and iSight is confirmed, as well as multiple color schemes. Check it out:
Also, check out this report from Engadget, confirming GPS functionality for the new phone. No word on any pricing yet, but with all this, it should be a pretty penny. WWDC starts Monday, so we should know then.
For business, i’d say the most important feature is exchange sync. and the gps is probably very handy as well.
However, 3g is probably most important to casual users who want to surf the web at faster speeds.