The iPhone 3GS is a smartphone that was designed and marketed by Apple Inc. It is the third generation iPhone and the successor to the iPhone 3G. It was unveiled on June 8, 2009 at the WWDC 2009 which took place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
This iPhone is named "3GS" where "S" stood for Speed (Phil Schiller had mentioned it in the launch keynote). Improvements include performance, a 3-megapixel camera with higher resolution and video ability, voice control, and support for 7.2 Mbit/s HSDPA downloading (but remains limited to uploading as Apple had not implemented the HSUPA protocol). It was released in the United States, Canada, and six European countries on June 19, 2009, in Australia and Japan on June 26, and internationally in July and August 2009.
The iPhone 3GS runs Apple's iOS operating system. It was succeeded as Apple's flagship smartphone by the iPhone 4 on June 24, 2010. At the same time, an 8 GB model of the iPhone 3GS was released, discontinuing the 16 and 32 GB models, the 8 GB 3GS continued in production until September 2012 when the iPhone 5 was announced.
History
The iPhone 3GS was released on June 19, 2009 in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Within the first weekend of its release, over 1 million iPhone 3GS units were sold. It reached its first million units sold as quickly as its predecessor, the iPhone 3G. After the release of the iPhone 4S, the 3GS was still offered for free on a contract until November 2011, when AT&T raised the price to 59 cents with no explanation. The 99¢ price was only available with a two-year contract on AT&T in the United States and a three-year contract on Telus, Rogers, Bell and Fido Solutions in Canada. This was a departure from Apple's previous trends, in which only two phones were sold.
Features
The new features of the iPhone 3GS are mainly internal changes regarding speed. The iPhone 3GS was reportedly twice as fast as its predecessor. Though in addition to the upgrades mainly regarding performance, various software features were also introduced exclusively to the iPhone 3GS such as video recording, voice control, and digital compass.
Operating system and software
The features iOS, Apple's mobile operating system. The user interface of iOS is based on the concept of direct manipulation, using multi-touch gestures. Interface control elements consist of sliders, switches, and buttons. Interaction with the OS includes gestures such as swipe, tap, pinch, and reverse pinch, all of which have specific definitions within the context of the iOS operating system and its multi-touch interface. Internal accelerometers are used by some applications to respond to shaking the device (one common result is the undo command) or rotating it vertically (one common result is switching from portrait to landscape mode).
Hardware
The LCD display on the device was designed by Apple and made by LG. It features a capacitive touchscreen with a pixel density of 163 pixels per inch (ppi) on a 480-by-320 display. Improvements over its predecessor's screen include 24-bit color emulation (18-bit color display plus dithering) for a more color rich display and oleophobic coating to help reduce fingerprints on the display. The capacitive touchscreen is designed for a bare finger, or multiple fingers for multi-touch sensing.
The iPhone 3GS features an improved 3-megapixel camera manufactured by OmniVision. In addition to the higher pixel count, it also features auto-focus, auto white balance and auto macro and is capable of capturing VGA video.
The iPhone 3GS's camera app features a slider which allows users to switch between capturing photos and recording videos, a tap-to-focus feature which allows users to tap on an area of the camera image to auto-focus on, 5x digital zoom (iOS 4 or later), autofocus and auto exposure lock when holding an area down (iOS 5 or later), and gridlines for composition (iOS 5 or later).
The iPhone 3GS is powered by the Samsung APL0298C05 chip, which was designed and manufactured by Samsung. This is the first iPhone with a system-on-a-chip. This system-on-a-chip is composed of an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU core underclocked to 600 MHz (from 833 MHz), integrated with a PowerVR SGX 535 GPU.
It has 256 MB of package on package (PoP) DRAM, twice the amount of the 3G, allowing for increased performance and multi-tasking.
Apple claims the iPhone 3GS is 2x faster than its predecessor, showing demonstrations of various apps loading in half the time its predecessor does.