by The Foundation | Twitter.com/thefndtn
We had all seen Apple’s iPhone 4 prototype before Steve Jobs delivered his annual WWDC keynote yesterday morning. At first glance, the unit that Jobs showed off was not unlike what we had expected — the surprises came in the form of remarkable craftsmanship and in-house applications.
Perhaps Mondays greatest surprise came in Apple’s latest mobile hardware. From the outside in, Apple carefully crafted what Jobs describes as “the most precise thing and one of the most beautiful things Apple’s ever made.” The phone’s razor thin at a mere 9.3mm thick At the heart of the new iPhone lies a blazing fast Apple A4 chipset (1GHz). The frame resembles a unibody MacBook Pro sandwiched between two pieces of glass and continues Apple’s trend with both black and white models available at launch. Stand-by battery life has also been bumped to 300 hours.
Steve Jobs brought Activision (Guitar Hero) and Zynga (Farmville) on stage to present their own Apps, but it was Apple’s in-house apps that stole the show. Leveraging the latest hardware, Apple delivered iMovie with HD quality recording, editing and publishing. Additionally, the iPad’s highly successful iBooks app will come to the iPhone with built in PDF viewing, bookmarks and note taking. Books purchased for the iPad will be downloadable on all Apple platforms at no extra cost.
Coupling new hardware with software, Apple hopes to utilize the iPhone’s front-facing camera to bring video calls to the masses. For now, the feature will only work between two iPhones connected to WiFi. Apple claims they have to “work a little bit with the carriers” to get video calls over 3G. With AT&T’s new data plans, would video over 3G make much sense?
The iPhone 4 will be available on June 24 but you can pre-order yours beginning June 15, 2010. US Pricing will begin at $199 for the 16 GB model. Another 16 GB will cost you an additional $100.
