
IPHONE 4
TECHNOLOGY NEWS
story by IGN & APPLE
After months of coverage, leaks and speculation, the new iPhones have been officially revealed! Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote presentation was mostly a confirmation of what we'd already heard before. Nevertheless, it's still good to hear it out loud. We're getting everything we suspected: a new design, multitasking and an upgraded camera system to name a few. The iPhone 4 will be available on June 24th, with a cost of $199 for the 16GB model and $299 for the 32GB. Preorders start on June 15th. Check out the different sections below for the highlights:
New Design
Just as expected, the iPhone 4G looked exactly like what we've seen leaked in the past: glass on the front and back, steel on the sides, front-facing camera, and an additional 5-megapixel camera with LED flash on the back. It's 24% thinner than the iPhone 3, making it the thinnest Smartphone to date according to Apple. It comes in two colors, black and white.
Multitasking
With its new operating system, iOS 4, and the iPhone is now capable of the long-awaited multitasking feature. This lets you keep multiple apps open at a time, to include iTunes, Skype and any apps that utilize the phone's GPS. Double-clicking the Home button will prompt Apple's task-managing interface, allowing you to access previously open applications.
3-Axis Gyroscope
This new feature will be paired with the accelerometer giving it 6-axis motion sensing. This will be great for gaming purposes, and it looks like Apple is increasingly making games one of their big priorities. This is telling with the upcoming releases of Farmville and Guitar Hero, which were also demonstrated at the presentation.
Retina Display
Basically, this means that the resolution of the screen has FOUR times as many pixels as the previous model, putting it at a whopping 326 pixels per inch with a 960x640 display (3.5 inches across). That's 78% of the pixels on iPad.
New Camera System The iPhone 4 is moving from 3 to 5 megapixels with 5x digital zoom. Not only that, but it now records HD video in 720p at 30fps. An iPhone adapted version of iMovie (for $4.99) will also be available for video editing. The new camera setup also allows for... FaceTime This new feature brings video chat technology to the iPhone. This will only run over WiFi, iPhone 4 to iPhone 4, and it can be accessed through either camera in both a horizontal and vertical orientation.
New Battery
Battery life is increased substantially: 7 hours of 3G talk, 6 hours of 3G browsing, 10 hours of WiFi browsing, 10 hours of video, 40 hours of music and 300 hours of standby.
New Software
In addition to the myriad of upcoming gyroscopic games, Jobs also revealed Bing, Netflix and iBooks for the iPhone. iBooks will also now be capable of reading PDF files.