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June 18, 2007

iphone

With 11 days to go, iPhone gets powered up

Posted Jun. 18, ’07, 8:03 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | iPhone

iPhone ChartWe’ve got just about a week and a half until the iPhone’s release, and lots of details are yet unknown (plan pricing, people?). If today is any indication, it looks as though Apple might spend the next week trickling out information on the revolutionary phone.

The press release from Cupertino this morning focused on two areas that have been of concern to many potential iPhone buyers: battery life and scratch-resistance. Jobs and co. announced that the final specs on the iPhone called for a significant improvement over what we heard in January (namely, 5 hours of talk, Internet, or video, and 16 hours of audio playback) :

iPhone will feature up to 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback.* In addition, iPhone will feature up to 250 hours—more than 10 days—of standby time.
That asterisk, of course, refers to the caveat that battery life depends on network configuration and other factors, and audio playback means 128kbps AAC-encoded songs of about four minutes.

Regardless, those numbers are a pretty impressive bump, especially when lined up against the competition, which Apple handily provides us in an included chart (pictured; hit the press release link above for a fullsize version). The iPhone seems to handily beat the Treo 750, Blackberry Curve, Samsung Blackjack, and Nokia N95, most of which only have about 4 hours of talk time, despite their smaller screens and (aside from the N95) lack of Wi-Fi. Of course, eking the most out of your battery is nothing if not a black art, so we’ll have to see how well these numbers hold up in the real world.

While they were hard at work increasing battery life, another small change has been made to the iPhone’s construction: the entire top surface of the iPhone, formerly plastic, has been replaced with optical-quality glass “to achieve a superior level of scratch resistance and optical clarity.” I would have thought that plastic would be more scratch resistant, but well, beverages taste better in glass bottles than plastic ones, so why not?

Now how about some more plan pricing details, Apple-san?

[via MacMinute]


1 Comments

Dave-O said:

I just went to the linked press release in Firefox on Windows (don't ask) and that chart looks like @$$. On Safari for Windows, it looks fine. Hmmm.

June 18, 2007 11:22 AM

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