Originally posted by: vexingv
no one has spoken about the issue that it is Assisted-GPS. can this truly supplant a dedicated (eg. Tomtom, Garmin) unit? and will one be required to have a wireless data plan to use this function?
Assisted GPS is an improvement on GPS - it's an enhancement of "regular" GPS. And it does require a wireless data plan to use it, but you don't need a wireless data plan to access the 3G iPhone's GPS when A-GPS isn't available (unless they limit it somehow to restrict this).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS
newsflash: iphone wireless internet plan now to be $30
Plus the required voice plan. It's $70 total...
I disagree, they added 3g and GPS and dropped the price in HALF.
They dropped it in half, but are requiring $10 more per month to use it... at the end of the day, you'll end up paying more than for the regular iPhone ($199 + 24 months * $10/month = $440 which is more than $399). Yes, it's faster, but normally AT&T hasn't been charging extra for 3G for other 3G phones on their network. Apple simply did some sleight of hand - they dropped the price in half and then made it up on the required 2 year contract by increasing the service fee.
I wonder how difficult it would be to unlock and keep unlocked.
It's most definitely going to be harder to unlock than the original iPhone. The hacks started when George Hotz took an iPhone apart, figured out the JTAG port location and then went in through the JTAG backdoor that all chips have ( JTAG explained:
http://www.inaccessnetworks.co...-intro/jtag-intro.html, Geohotz's Blog with the details of the original hack in mid-Aug. 2007:
http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com...orking-using-jtag.html ). This is really cool, but usually on chips requiring security, JTAG ports are password protected - they require an unlock key. It's unusual that something like a baseband CPU wouldn't have a JTAG password. So, in my humble opinion, there is no possible conceivable way that Infineon forgot to put an unlock key into the new iPhone's baseband chip. So this time, the JTAG hack is highly unlikely to happen. At CPU companies, only a select few engineers know the fairly long and difficult to crack JTAG key for a shipping product, and one would think that Infineon is going to be very careful about who gets to know it.
Without the JTAG hack, the unlock will be harder. People are clever at reverse-engineering and hacking, but I would guess it will be many months before the 3G iPhone is unlocked, and that it will take longer than last time (which was just a couple of months). Also there are other cool touchscreen phones on the horizon (Android-based models, the Garmin NuviPhone, the Blackberry Thunder, etc.) which will reduce the need to go through all the trouble of trying to reverse engineer the 3G iPhone - why spent lots and lots of hours unlocking an iPhone when you could buy an unlocked Android model instead. Besides, in the US, T-Mobile will use (is using) 1.7GHz AWS with their 3G solution that they are barely into rolling out. AWS is incompatible the 3G chipset in the 3G iPhone. So there's less incentive in the US to unlock it.
Also when they brought up WM and the task manager I agree. Found myself almost daily going to mine on my Q and ending processes to make the damn thing run at a decent speed. The Push technology Apple has implimented where you can get notifications even when the program isn't running is damn cool.
Facebook
Twitter