Apple announced Mobileme and 3G iPhone

It’s been a long wait, but Apple finally took the wraps off its 3G iPhone Mobileme. Thinner edges, full plastic back, flush headphone jack, and the iPhone 2.0 firmware — Apple’s taking a lot of the criticisms to heart from the first time around. Clearly 3G is at the front, but they’re also making sure it’s accessible all over globally, works with enterprises, runs 3rd party apps… and does it all for cheaper. Apple claims its 3G speeds trounce the competition, with pageloads 36% faster than the N95 and Treo 750 — and of course it completely trounces the old EDGE data. 3G iPhone Battery life isn’t getting put out to pasture though, with 300 hours of standby, 8-10 hours of 2G talk, 5 hours of 3G talk, 7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio. GPS is also a go. Apple is using A-GPS, which supplements regular satellite GPS data with info from cellular towers. WiFi data is also worked into the mix, which should give users a pretty solid lock on where the heck they are on this planet. Unfortunately, there’s no front-facing cam, which syncs with what we were hearing, but is still a little disappointing. Apple hopes to launch in 70 countries this year. 3G iPhone 8GB is available for $199, 16GB for $299 — and the 16GB comes in white. Both pricepoints require a contract. Apple will be hitting the biggest markets, including the US, on July 11th.

The gossips were true, Apple just revealed their new MobileMe service. Push mail, contacts and calendar data all in the cloud and synced back to your iPhone over the air. MobileMe works with the Mac’s Mail.app, iCal, and Address Book as well as on PCs for those using Microsoft’s Outlook. It’s built around Ajax and fully web 2.0 so that you can access the service from your favorite web browser while maintaining the look and feel of your desktop applications. Syncs photos from your iPhone too. Available at me.com for $99/year and 20GB of on-line storage — 60 day free trial in early July.

From EnGadget:

• We did a quick data test — at our location we went from 104Kbps on the EDGE iPhone to 215Kbps on the 3G model. 2x ain’t bad, yo.
• The enable/disable 3G setting is real, and buried a few menus deep. There is no automatic switching, Apple just assumes you’ll leave 3G on, and that the iPhone has the juice to support that usage.
• It’s tri-band 3G, as we reported the other day. This same phone will ship worldwide.
• WiFi is still 802.11b/g, no support for n yet.
• Yes, that GPS is A-GPS, just as we mentioned.
• Geotagging photos is a thumbs-up. We were deep indoors though, so native GPS wasn’t working and we couldn’t get a clear idea of satellite acquisition time.
• The screen looks exactly the same — maybe a tiny bit brighter, but the unit was new, so it’d be negligible.
• The camera is identical to the first — 2 megapixels. No front-facing camera (of course).
• It’s certainly thicker feeling, but they rocked it Treo-style and really tapered those edges, so it just doesn’t feel that different. But because of that curved back, it’ll dance around on your table a little more than your completely-flat original iPhone.
• The plastic back didn’t feel too cheap. In fact, it felt pretty solid. It’s very glossy, so it’ll pick up fingerprints just as well as the glass up front (yay).
• It comes with a ridiculously, absurdly small power adapter. It basically looks like a tiny square with a USB port on one side, and power prongs on the other. It will power any other iDevice (iPod touch, 1st gen iPhone, etc.), and sell separately for those that want a smaller adapter.
• The dock (now sold separately) and adapter (if you want an extra) will both go for something like $29, although that price is not yet confirmed.
• No mention was made of copy/paste, MMS, etc.
• It doesn’t look like this thing is going to fit in your old dock. The new dock does look smaller and more sculpted to the new iPhone’s curves.
• The headphone jack is flush, as mentioned. It’s still 3.5mm, so if you don’t like the out of box phones (which won’t stay in our ears), bring your own, no problem — and no adapter needed!
• Yes, original iPhones are totally gone, you won’t be seeing those made anymore. Long live the aluminum back!

It looks like they took an amazing device and made it significantly better. If the 3g iPhone battery life is as good as they claim, we think this will steamroll the competition in the enterprise space. And even if it doesn’t, at $199 it’s going to be extremely hard for people to resist.And also Mobileme service available at me.com for $99/year and 20GB of on-line storage and you can get 60 day free trial in early July.