iPhone 3GS — Same Outside, Faster Inside

The iPhone 3GS was announced on 8 June 2009 at the WWDC 2009 keynote in San Francisco, presented by Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. It was released on Friday 19 June 2009 in eight countries: the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Japan was not in the first wave: SoftBank Mobile released it there a week later, on Friday 26 June. The year before, Japan had been among the 21 launch-day countries for the iPhone 3G; this time it waited a week.

In the US, with a new two-year AT&T contract, the iPhone 3GS cost $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB. The iPhone 3G stayed on sale in an 8GB version only, cut to $99. The price points were the same as the year before; the storage at each had doubled.

Pricing in Japan

SoftBank Mobile announced on 9 June 2009 that the iPhone 3GS would go on sale across Japan on 26 June. Under its "iPhone for everybody" campaign, paid over 24 months, the effective cost was ¥11,520 for 16GB and ¥23,040 for 32GB; without the campaign it was ¥23,040 and ¥34,560. The campaign required a two-year contract commitment and ran until 30 September. In effect, a 32GB iPhone 3GS cost the same as an 8GB iPhone 3G had a year earlier.

What changed from the iPhone 3G

From the outside almost nothing changed: the same 3.5-inch screen, plastic back and single home button. Side by side, the 3G and 3GS were hard to tell apart. Everything that changed was inside.

S for speed

Apple's own materials did not spell out what the S stood for. According to AllThingsD's live blog of the keynote, Schiller explained the S as speed and called it a really fast iPhone; the same blog recorded him showing NYTimes.com loading more than three times as fast. Apple's press release put it as up to twice as fast as the iPhone 3G — the previous model, not the original.

The pattern stuck. Keep the outside, speed up the inside, add an S: the iPhone 4S in 2011, the iPhone 5s in 2013 and the iPhone 6s in 2015 all followed it.

Camera, video, voice and direction

In the press release, Schiller singled out the autofocus camera, video recording and the freedom of Voice Control.

• Camera: 3 megapixels with autofocus, plus tap to focus — touch the screen and the camera re-adjusted focus and exposure on that spot
• Video recording: the first iPhone that could shoot video, with trimming of the start and end points on the phone itself
• Voice Control: speak into the built-in or headset microphone to dial by name or number, or to control music playback. It was not Siri, which came two years later; it recognised fixed commands
• Digital compass: a Compass app showed which way you were heading and rotated as you turned
• Nike + iPod: put the optional $19 sensor in a Nike + shoe and the phone itself tracked the run

iPhone OS 3.0 arrived the same week

Two days before the 3GS went on sale, on 17 June, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0, a free update for the iPhone 3G and the original iPhone. It brought cut, copy and paste, MMS, Spotlight search, a landscape keyboard and a Voice Memos app, among other things.

This is easy to mix up. Copy and paste and Voice Memos were features of OS 3.0, not of the 3GS hardware, and older iPhones got them too. On 22 June Apple said six million customers had downloaded OS 3.0 in its first five days. What only the 3GS had is the list in the table above: the camera, video, Voice Control and the compass.

A million in three days

On 22 June 2009 Apple announced that more than one million iPhone 3GS units had been sold in the three days to Sunday 21 June. Steve Jobs's comment in the release was that customers were voting and the iPhone was winning. It matched the iPhone 3G's three days to a million, though from eight launch countries instead of 21. Both figures are Apple's own.

Where the iPhone 3GS sits

The iPhone 3GS was the first iPhone to change the inside while keeping the outside. In June 2010 the iPhone 4 replaced it with a new glass-and-stainless-steel body and the Retina display.

The whole line is on the iPhone timeline, and the company on Apple.