Apple rolls out new iPhone 3GS, lower pricing
Today felt a lot like Christmas for me, especially as I sat and watched the liveblogging of Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote presentation. The excitement peaked when Apple unveiled the next generation iPhone – the 3GS (the ‘S’ stands for ‘Speed’).
The newest version of the popular mobile device is packed with new features – like auto-zoom camera, video recording, digital compass, longer battery life, etc. There are plenty of places where you can read all the juicy details about the 3GS, so I’m not going to go into much detail here. But there are a few things I found interesting.
The price for the new iPhone starts at $199 for the 16GB model and goes up to $299 for a 32GB model. The kicker is, for all you bargain hunters out there, you can still buy a quality 8GB iPhone 3G for only $99! I imagine these lower price points will greatly increase the number of iPhones sold throughout the world.
Good news for ebooks too
And the more iPhones sold around the world, the more likely it is we will see an increase in popularity of ebooks, especially given the number of ebook reading apps now available for the iPhone. I’m not a numbers guy or a financial wizard, so I’m not going to speculate on the increase we’ll see, but I bet it will be substantial.
The one disappointment at today’s WWDC event, however, was that there was no unveiling of a much anticipated Apple tablet computer. Such a device would probably be ideal for ebook reading and might be a real ‘Kindle-killer’, or at the very least, give the Kindle a run for its money.
Right now I’m still perfectly content to use my first generation iPhone, which has served me well over the last 1.5 years I’ve had it. The third-party apps have greatly increased its functionality and I do everything on it from reading the news, checking my Facebook account, reading ebooks (of course!), and oh yes, using it as a cell phone.
With that said, I’m not in any big hurry to upgrade to the latest and greatest (although I wouldn’t turn the opportunity down either). What about you current iPhone users? Are you going to upgrade to the 3GS? Or stick with what you got?
P.S. Nothing new on the iPod Touch front, except for the 3.0 OS upgrade coming on June 17.
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