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The Apple iPhone 2 and firmware 2.3

By Steve Litchfield on December 13, 2008

[Wharamurrrrrr……] The flux capacitor hisses, the time disk whirrs and I’m standing in the auditorium at the Moscone Centre on January 5th 2009. Now THAT’s fortuitous. Ooh, Steve Jobs is on stage. Let’s listen in.

Peering into MacWorld 2009

Peering into MacWorld 2009

He’s announcing the successor to the iPhone 3G – it’s….. the iPhone 2! Let’s see what they’ve added. Not a huge change in outward appearance, though it looks a little slimmer in profile. Ah, the camera’s been bumped up to 3.2 megapixels and there’s auto-focus and a dual LED flash. Now that’s a big improvement and will have a lot of people who had rejected the iPhone because its camera was so…. rubbish, now looking again. And it seems that videos can be recorded as well, at 400 by 240 resolution, just right for the new widescreened YouTube. Memory is 32GB as standard, just one model.

Most of the other changes are in software and will also appear as a free upgrade in firmware for the iPhone 3G and as a paid upgrade for the iPod Touches. Copy and paste has appeared (hurrah!), with an extension to the existing ‘loop’ magnifying glass system for cursor positioning. That will please a lot of people. And there’s now full support for third party applications to run in the background, albeit with stricter testing needed by Apple before their availability in the App Store. It seems the iPhone’s claim on being a smartphone is now complete. 

Interestingly, the push-notify system announced over six months ago has been quietly dropped. Well, it was a kludge at best, noone’s going to miss its non-appearance. 

It seems that there are plenty of eye candy tweaks too, such as being able to change the background from black (whoo-pe-doo), plus a number of enterprise-y improvements that I won’t pretend to understand. No sign of MMS, sadly.

He’s leaving the stage. Or is he? “One more thing…. I’d also like to present…”

But arghhhh – my time machine’s auto-return has been engaged and I didn’t catch his last words.

A whoosh and a hiss and I’m back a month in December 2008. Tiring, this time travel.

 

Time machine

Time machine

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net James Burland

    You tease you!

    “One more thing”… MacBook nano.

  • N95-iPhone

    i’d rather keep the current thickness, and increase the battery capacity, to be honest.
    also, we are going to see a compass in the next iphone for sure. and i wonder if the next iphone already will be built on the new, apple custom-designed chip set. this alone could make a huge difference in terms of speed and battery consumption (compared to the competitors).

  • chrsfrwll

    Ha ha. You’ll be telling us that it will have CZ optics and full support for BT3. Oh and support for third party micro SD cards. Of course the camera res is still miles behind competition, which by now (then?) will be 8MP minimum.

  • http://blog.mcmanus-family.com Drew McManus

    I really hope they fix the terrible MMS situation soon. I make the case here: http://blog.mcmanus-family.com/2008/09/the-case-for-mms-on-the-iphone.html

  • Nikolay Andreev

    There will not be a new iPhone until next summer. I do not think Apple has ever relased a successor to a hardware device less than a year after its introduction.

    Most of the issues the population of the Planet earth has with the iPhone 3G are:
    1. It is not sold everywhere.
    2. It is still expensive even in countries were it is offered with a plan.
    3. missing software issues that make you ever look forward to that next update for those who have one already.

  • http://www.Mixit.TV Gerry

    Proper – Bluetooth – A2DP! thats all that we need … ! (yeah and flash, video etc… )

  • http://www.lookatbowen.com/nokia-n95 Mike

    What Apple should do is pick up the original true smartphone (a Nokia N95) or one of their latest (Nokia N85 or Nokia N96) and add all the features these phones have that the iPhone 3G is lacking at the moment. Ha Ha Ha!

    Now, anything they add extra will be a bonus I am sure to all iPhone sheep.

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net Matt Radford

    I have to agree with Nikolay – the new iPhone won’t be released until the middle of 2009.

    Other than that, there will be a slew of improvements I’m sure. I’m slowing realising that there will always be things lacking from Apple devices that I’d really love to have, but the overall experience makes up for it.

    I’m sure the next iPhone will have a better camera, and should therefore come with video recording. But I don’t see background apps happening – a degraded experience that users have of a device that *can* do everything at once, except when it *can’t*, because it doesn’t have the juice. That isn’t the Apple way.

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net Matt Radford

    Oh and James – your MacBook Nano is a 11′ MacBook Air. Netbook convenience at Apple prices!

  • http://www.timezone.com Charles_N

    Steve,

    That was really nasty of you.

    I went looking for version 2.3 whilst reading the article.

    And then … I came back down to earth with a bump.

  • Rima

    Well, I read somewhere the next releases from apple would be iPhone 3G’s in different sizes. There is going to be a “low-budget” version with 4 GB memory and a “high-end” version with 8 GB.
    To release that many serious improvements as described in this article would be a stupid thing to do from apple, as it would finish off the 3G before it would have started to throw off some real profit.
    So I guess they’ll just release some software improvements as well as minor hardware updates to reach out to more people.

    What might well be included in FW 2.3 could be those upgrades to text editing, such as copy/paste and horizontal keyboard in messaging.

    I sort of doubt Apple would ever oficially allow themes on the iPhone, since not even Mac OS X supports them. But changing the homescreen backgound could also be good enough for “non-jailbroken” devices, for now.

  • Rima

    My bad…the “high-end” version will of course have 32GB and not pathetic 8gig 😛 sry4typo and doublepost

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net James Burland

    If history teaches us anything it’s that we are like to see an iPhone nano.

    Exactly the same spec as the original iPhone (not 3G), but slight smaller, cheaper and in a range of colours.

    My question is this; How about an iPhone Pro? Bigger, heavier, but with video capture, a 960 x 640 (making sure that current Apps scale nicely) and a much larger price tag, obviously.

  • Rima

    Not yet…the app system is too young to trouble it with different sized displays, as programmers would have to know about that quite a while before release to fit their apps. Further I doubt that video capture is that important to apple to be a major spec of a whole new iPhone.

    And I also doubt they would enlarge the screen in any way as that would cost way too much battery and cpu power.

    They are more likely to release an “iPhone nano” with less memory and in different colors…still the software would probably remain uniform. So would most probably the display. They could change and reposition the home btn and shrink the upper part so the phone would be as big as the display…pretty much.

    On the other hand that would make the device a lot unhandier for gaming which would also impact on the appstore.

    So they might well leave the iPhone nano as nobody seems to complain about the current size.

    Speculations over speculations…well, time will tell…at least

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net James Burland

    Rima: That’s why I mentioned 960 x 640 pixels. A simple doubling is all that is required to make current apps fit perfectly and without any jaggies. The downside would be a slight softening of the doubled image.

  • http://www.unlockiphonehq.com Unlock iPhone 3G

    What Apple should do is pick up the original true smartphone (a Nokia N95) or one of their latest (Nokia N85 or Nokia N96) and add all the features these phones have that the iPhone 3G is lacking at the moment. Ha Ha Ha!