Apple has eliminated so many annoying little hang-ups that you might run into when using the old one. The GPS pinpoints to meters instead of blocks. The 3G connection slashes web loading times by minutes to seconds. The more rounded case feels great in the hand. And most importantly the new software polishes the OS and opens the phone up to nearly unlimited capabilities through the countless programs that are already being written by the brilliant legions of faithful developers. It's kind of cool.

If you want to cut to the chase, the software is what we're most excited about—so much that we ran the first half of this review earlier extolling the iPhone 2.0 virtues in detail, including the fact that it's a free upgrade for the people who snapped up the first iPhone, perhaps before it was ready.

On the software side, the iPhone has the most advanced touchscreen OS out there today. Scrolling, dialing, panning, zooming, touching and pinching are all actions you can do to get around your photos, your maps, your movies, your music and of course, your phone calls. The iPhone 2.0 update improves on the already great communication features such as desktop-class email and web browsing by adding MobileMe and Exchange support—both of which push emails to your phone as soon as they're received, just like on the BlackBerry. These two new additions also allow your phone to always sync contacts and calendar events with your computer or your office's system directly over the air, without ever needing to dock, or take any action. There's also the App Store, which gives you access to a gigantic library of third-party applications to add features such as controlling your iTunes, instant messaging, 3D gaming and To Do lists. One drawback is that Apple may not support the cool (illegal) apps like the NES emulators and video recording programs that don't work through the SDK. Lots of unofficial third party apps may never make it to the store. One, Instinctiv, a super iPhone music shuffle app, was recently denied store sales because it is against the terms of agreement to enhance the iPod or iPhone music playback in any way. Huh?! Apps also take a long time (minutes) to install and uninstall, and backups now take awhile longer than before. Annoying, but still worth the wait.

The fact that the free software's advantages are available on the original iPhone means that the reduced subsidized price $199 for the 8GB and $299 for the 16GB are good, but maybe not good enough to justify a trade-in. (The $10 extra a month for 3G access is a wash, frankly.) Quite a conundrum for those of you tempted.

Onto the hardware. Let's start with the husk: Once, I sat down on a twisted key, putting a giant scar across the aluminum back of my iPhone. With that one exception aside, my iPhone's abused-to-hell case still looks strong and shiny.

The new case is made of smudge-able plastic, and last time I checked geek material lust hierarchy, plastic was a distant ranking of 452342 places behind aluminum. The effect is that the case, feels lighter, warmer and thicker but also cheaper than before. And in your hand, picking up a slightly warm iPhone, it feels almost more organic. Between that and the the rounded shape, which fits far better in the hand, it's like you're cupping a warm baby bird. The old phone by comparison feels like its a better quality device, with the spiritual heft of a German machine. The new case is lighter but actually thicker; still, it feels less significant and durable. The case did survive being put in a bag full of keys and rubbed vigorously. Only some of the silver Apple logo on the back got visibly scratched. The case is also a lot easier to send radio waves through than the previous case—useful as this phone has many more radios—although reception improvement was not noticeable. [UPDATE: Actually, it is much better, in both EDGE and 3G mode] Also, if you place the new model on a table, it rocks when you tap the screen, so you can't use it as a table top computer anymore. And the case is very easy to smudge. The black color is available in both sizes, but the white only comes in pricier 16GB, much to the chagrin of boyfriends who promised to buy their significant others one in the pale tint.

The screen is slightly warmer in color temperature (more yellow than blue), slightly brighter (even when considering decay over time) and the daylight viewing is better, but it's the same 3.5-inch, 480x320 resolution screen. And it's still gorgeous.

Oh, the headphone jack isn't recessed anymore, so you can use whatever headphones or adapters you want. And the lock and volume buttons are recessed slightly more and are metal. The speakers and earpiece have a metal grill behind them. All this, to great effect.

To mention the 3G is to bring up painful memories, the time I've lost waiting for web pages to load on the iPhone, or standing on street corners waiting for maps to load.

Our tests in AT&T's aggressively built-out NYC area showed the 3G connection is 4.8 times faster than the old EDGE connection. When you turn off 3G and do an EDGE-to-EDGE test between older and newer models, they both perform the same. The GPRS (850, 900, 1800, 1900) and UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900 and 2100 MHz) cellular radios have the advantage of some design improvements, including the use of the steel ring around the screen as an antenna and the electronic transparency of the now all plastic back.

Wi-Fi reception is better. In a side-by-side test with the old iPhone, we walked away from an access point, the old iPhone's connection died at 100 feet and the newer one lasted to about 120 feet. And there's a new Airplane mode that turns off cellular but powers up Wi-Fi for airline internet.

At the end of a day with lots of email and browser use, or media playback, my old iPhone would be begging for a serious dock charge. How does the iPhone's 3G connection affect that?

The downside of such speedy downloads is a reduced battery life, something the original couldn't stand to lose much of. We're do more testing of that soon. But here's an interesting thing: According to the data out there, the iPhone 3G has better battery life using 3G than the old iPhone does using EDGE. Let me explain. Apple's official browsing battery life rating on Wi-Fi is 6 hours for both models. They never rated the EDGE battery life but most testers found it to be about 25% less than Wi-Fi. That's 4.5 hours. The iPhone 3G rating is 5 hours of browsing. Apple is claiming that it's 5 hours for both the new iPhone 3G and the EDGE on the old one. We shall investigate such claims soon. But I wish Apple would take me up on my idea for using the 3G only for active browsing, maps and certain apps that need it, dynamically switching to EDGE for IMing, email downloading and weather checking.

UPDATE: Battery life has been noted to drain very quickly, but because I find myself using the phone a lot more often thanks to the added usefulness of apps. 3D gaming is also a killer on battery, far worse than anyone has claimed so far, thanks to the constant use of CPU, GPU and LCD backlight. Here is a roundup of nine battery tests taken from the best reviews, averaging about 5 hours for 3G talk (good) and 3-5 hours for "mixed use". Regardless of life, here are some tips on increasing iPhone 3G endurance and some gadgets that can help extend battery life.

Phone-wise, I decided to lower my minute plan. I completely have stopped using my old iPhone for voice in San Francisco's spotty network, and even when I'm connected, everyone sounds like they have marbles in their mouth. Network problems aside, the good news is that basic voice quality issues have been fixed.

Doing side-by-side calls, the difference when using the new phone and old is like the difference between talking to someone with their hand over their mouth and with their hand taken away. While the new iPhone's speaker and mic definitely improve sound quality, it seems packets do matter too. When the the phone is running on a 3G network (in downtown NY), calls sound especially clear compared to the old iPhone. But when both iPhones are on EDGE, the call difference is noticeable, but not night and day. Even the speakerphone's audio is much louder and so, music played through the mono speaker is also improved. As for reception back in spotty coverage areas, I'll have to do a side-by-side soon to let you know how that goes. UPDATE: I could make no calls before in my house. Now I can, in both EDGE and 3G mode, with good (not great clarity). This is fantastic.

The old iPhone's location detector was accurate within a few blocks, using Skyhook's system of logging cellular towers and Wi-Fi spot MAC addresses and pairing them with physical addreses. I thought it was fine for making sure when I searched for an ATM machine, it would only return local results. The new A-GPS system is accurate within meters, though, opening up the iPhone to more useful location-based apps, maps and geotagging of photos.

The A-GPS helps get quicker fixes in the city, compared with a typical PND. However it doesn't refresh as quickly (every 5 to 15 steps), and won't give you a "heading-up" view, so when you're walking, it takes a bit longer to figure out where you're going. This is clearly optimized for walking, though in a pinch it could help lost drivers. The greater accuracy isn't the only reason it's better than the older iPhone: The ability to track your path is a nice enhancement too. The time to GPS lock is between 1 and 10 seconds, using a combination of Wi-Fi and cellular as well as GPS. But don't even think about using this for regular car nav: there is no voice prompting, nor is there automatic turn-by-turn.

Apple didn't write a dedicated turn-by-turn navigator for driving, with voice, but now we hear that companies are making them, so we look forward to revisiting this once real navi apps are out.

The old iPhone's software can take a photo and email it or send it to a MobileMe gallery, but the camera itself is relatively weak. It won't capture video, and I've lost countless YouTube hits by not having a video device at the ready. This situation has not been improved much.

UPDATE: One nice thing we've finally confirmed is that the dreaded buzz you got with speakers and tape adapters too close to the iPhone with the GSM connection running during calls or data disappears when you're running 3G.

The new camera has the same 2MP shooter which returns 1600 x 1200 pixels. There still isn't video capture. Image processing seems to be slightly less grainy but it's not something you would notice. The MP count would be fine, but the low-light quality is still terrible. Nokia and Motorola have built thin phones with better imaging, why not Apple? And Apple's forte is software, so why can't they beef up the software tools, by adding image stabilizers and noise reducers, not to mention Photo Booth-type frames and effects?

Inside the box: A new smaller USB charger the size of an ice cube, headphones, a sync cable and a SIM eject tool. There is no longer a dock included to use with the cable.

This is really not a revolutionary phone. It's more like the iPhone we wished Apple made last year. But basics, like cut, copy and paste are still missing. (As is MMS, thanks for the reminder, commenters.) As well are the ability to use the phone like a hard drive. Other than that, we're hoping for some more revolutionary changes to come by software update. And let's take a moment to remember how many developers are making killer iPhone programs right this second. There's the revolution.

So the hardware is interesting in the iPhone 3G, but the real story here is the new iPhone OS 2.0 firmware, which we've written about in depth here. You manage to install that, old iPhone users, you've got about 80% of this new iPhone's mojo. But if you're not making your calls on an iPhone yet, well, what are you waiting for?

[Our iPhone App Review Marathon, iPhone 2.0 Firmware Review: Forget 3G It's the Code That Counts]

The event
• Our complete event liveblog
• Steve on video, doing his thing
• iPhone 3G advertising

The iPhone 3G
• Our iPhone 3G Hands On
• iPhone availability

Pricing and availability
• Pricing and activation in the US
• International availability
• AT&T memo regarding iPhone sales policies
• Upgrading policy

Software and applications
• iPhone 2.0 Operating System for iPhone and iPod touch
• The iPhone Applications Store and featured apps
• GPS, traffic and photo geotagging
• iPhone 3G and Mobile Me services

Giz Explains
•What You Didn't Know About the iPhone's 3G Powers
•Everything You Wanted to Know About the iPhone 3G's GPS

Opinion
• Apple Says White Is Cool Again... But Is It?
• What the iPhone is missing

Other
• iPhone Sim Ejector Tool makes it instant must-buy
• "iPhone 3G" FCC Application Hints at Potential Apple "Smartphone"
• Rumor check

• iPhone 3G Videoconferencing Kit

Participation
• Are you going to get the iPhone 3G?

Asked about what that meant, Mr. Munster further clarified his statement as "a whole lot. You know, like, zing!" It is still unclear when this new Mac device will appear in the marketplace, but Mr. Munster is confident that it will be soon: "Timing of this is difficult to determine, but we would expect it sometime in 2008. Day up, day down, you know, but around there."

The documents discovered today indicate that Apple may use a radio transmitter that complies with a standard called HSDPA or "High-Speed Downlink Packet Access." According to Gizmodo's Editor-in-Chief Brian Lam "HSDPA could really give us high data transfers, potentially around 7.2mbps. Yeah, 7.2. That's a lot of zing!" Mr. Lam also indicated that he suspected the new Apple device may have other advanced features like email, a travel system designed to guide you to different destinations, and "possibly an alarm clock."

Apple didn't return calls for comment.

[FCC via Into Mobile]

• Communication Module
• Contact/Motion Module
• Graphics Module
• Text Input Module
• GPS Module

Applications
• Contacts Module
• Telephone Module
• Video conference Module
• E-mail Client Module
• Instant messaging Module
• Blogging Module
• Camera Module
• Image Management Module
• Video Player Module
• Music Player Module
• Browsing Module

Widgets
Weather
Stocks
Calculator
Alarm Clock
Dictionary
User-created widget
Widget Creator Module (Web clip?)
Search Module

What feature would you like to see in the next generation iPhone, apart from bloody copy and paste? [Cellpassion—thanks Jon]

It's very interesting, even if one or more of these details could be misinformation given out to different companies to determine which one of them is spilling the beans on Apple's confidential specs. The big difference about the appearance seems to be the ditching of the brushed metal/black plastic look on the back in favor of a more plastic look that approximates metal, like a car, or Iron Man. [iLounge]

Getting children to the operating room is extremely scary for them (and us too), so they usually have to be sedated to calm them down. Dr. Low observed that by watching some videos on the iPhone, his kids got completely disconnected from the outside world. He thought that this effect could help children in the hospital get distracted—especially when they leave the room where they wait with their parents—so he gave it a try.

It worked. And for six months, he has used this method with 450 children, reducing the use of sedatives by 85%. The benefit not only makes the children a little bit less nervous: without sedatives, kids wake up smoother and are less drowsy after the operation, so they can get back home more quickly.

Of course, this can be done with any video playing device, but Dr. Low seems to believe that the iPhone is perfect for the job, arguing that it doesn't interfere with the equipment and can be easily sanitized. We are sure that the same can be said about other personal media players, but whatever helps kids is fine with us. [King5]

Tests have been carried out, and they have worked a charm. However, before you guys go nuts about downloading completely legal torrent files, there are some things you should know:

• This is a command line client at present, and although someone will chuck a GUI on it in the near future, steer clear unless you can handle messing with terminal.
• EDGE and P2P will screw your shit up. If you plan to get your download on, it's WiFi all the way.
• If you start a download immediately before having sex, your iPhone's battery will be dead before you are finished; i.e. torrenting will drain your battery extremely rapidly.
• You won't see this up in installer.app, hit through on the link for further instructions.

All that aside, this is a neat development and bodes well for the post-SDK era. If anyone does give this one a go, let us know how you get on. [Wickedpsyched via TUAW]

First, AT&T put out a press release saying that 2 million iPhones were subscribed on their service by the end of 2007. The three European carriers with iPhones (O2, Orange and T-Mobile) don't have official numbers, but iLounge rates them at about 300-400k, which means the total is only around 2.4 million. This, with Apple's announcement that 3.7 million iPhones were sold in 2007, makes put the number at about 1/3 of all iPhones being unlocked.

Even if the European iPhone numbers are low and AT&T customers haven't activated their Christmas phones yet, that still puts unlocked iPhone numbers somewhere around 1/3 to 1/4, which is extremely high by any count. [iLounge - Thanks David!]

To upgrade, we put the phone in recovery mode, then connected to iTunes and restored/ upgraded. After the phone had finished upgrading, it would not work with our already valid ATT sim, so we had to activate the phone using iTunes. This is where we ran into some trouble, because after activating the iPhone under our existing account, the phone still did not show any signal and would not activate to our account. We restarted the phone and just like magic, were taken directly to the home screen. The phone now had signal and was clearly activated to our account. We made a few test calls, and tested the data connection, both with complete success.

For all of you out there that will state the video could be fake because it has been edited, let us direct your attention to the plastic-film that is still on the glass of the iPhone. In every shot you will see that the phone still has it's plastic-film on, confirming we are using the same phone before and after.

Multi-recipient SMS is exactly what it sounds like. Pick more than one recipient, send a message, and it gets delivered to everyone. What's nice is that this set of people get saved as a "conversation" so you can send more messages to them without having to type in their names again.

Icon reorganization: same as what we've seen before. Hold down an icon, everything starts shaking, then you can drag stuff around to a new location. Drag an icon to the edge of the screen to get to the next or previous page. Swipe left and right to switch pages.

Webclips also works as advertised, letting you to bookmark a page onto your home screen. There's nothing special about this other than the fact that you can remember a specific part of the page and go to it every time.

* The ability to send an SMS message to multiple people is now there
* Google Maps application can now pinpoint your location using cell tower triangulation
* Google Maps can now display the Hybrid map view
* You can now drag and drop application icons on your home screen
* The home screen supports pagination
* You can now add web bookmarks to your home screen

This is why a managed SDK with sandboxed apps like the one Jobs proposes for February is going to be a lot better than opening up the device outright, like it or not. Since this is a hack done via a website, it's likely the 1.1.1 TIFF exploit that can be patched by a) installing Apple's 1.1.2 patch or hacking your 1.1.1 iPhone using the Jailbreakme.com installer website. The guy runs all this on a LAN, knowing IPs, but it wouldn't be hard to have malware ping home, either. Nothing to scoff at, but also not surprising given the unofficial nature of the apps developed so far, and maybe nothing to freak out over. [FC via CrunchHickey]

Third Party Applications on the iPhone

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers. It will take until February to release an SDK because we're trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target. Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than "totally open," we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone's amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs. We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones. Steve P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch.

Programs are sorted by Most Recent, Most Popular, Alphabetical and Staff Picks. The most popular programs are the Facebook app, Bejeweled, Sudoku, and a Twitter app called Hahlo. My favorite gem of a program is called "Name Tag." It turns your iPhone into a $400 "Hello My Name is" sticker. Of course, none of these hold a candle to native OS X iPhone apps, but I don't want to sound like a broken record. Point your iPhone browser to... [Apple.com/webapps]