iPhone

The iPhone is an Internet and multimedia enabled smartphone designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPhone functions as a camera phone (also including text messaging and visual voicemail), a portable media player (equivalent to a video iPod), and an Internet client (with email, web browsing, and Wi-Fi connectivity) — using the phone's multi-touch screen to render a virtual keyboard in lieu of a physical keyboard.

The first-generation phone (known as the Original) was quad-band GSM with EDGE; the second generation phone (known as 3G) added UMTS with 3.6 Mbps HSDPA;[17] the third generation adds support for 7.2 Mbps HSDPA downloading but remains limited to 384 Kbps uploading as Apple had not implemented the HSPA protocol.[18]

Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007,[19] after months of rumors and speculation.[20] The original iPhone was introduced in the United States on June 29, 2007 before being marketed worldwide. Time magazine named it the Invention of the Year in 2007.[21] Released July 11, 2008, the iPhone 3G supports faster 3G data speeds and assisted GPS.[17] On March 17, 2009, Apple announced version 3.0 of the iPhone OS operating system for the iPhone (and iPod Touch), released on June 17, 2009.[22] The iPhone 3GS was announced on June 8, 2009, and has improved performance, a camera with more megapixels and video capability, and voice control.[23] It was released in the U.S., Canada and 6 European countries on June 19, 2009,[3] in Australia and Japan on June 26,[24] and saw international release in July and August, 2009.

iPhone OS

The iPhone OS, known as OS X iPhone in its early history, is the operating system developed by Apple Inc. for the iPhone and iPod touch.[2][3] Like Mac OS X, from which it was derived, it uses the Darwin foundation.[4] iPhone OS has four abstraction layers: the Core OS layer, the Core Services layer, the Media layer, and the Cocoa Touch layer. The operating system takes less than 240 Megabytes of the device's total memory storage.[5]

This operating system did not have an official name until the release of the first beta version of the iPhone SDK on March 6, 2008. Before then, Apple marketing literature simply stated that the "iPhone uses OS X," a reference to Apple's desktop operating system, Mac OS X.[6]

As of Nov. 4, 2009, there are over 100,000 applications officially available for the iPhone[7], and 2 billion downloads had been achieved.

On September 9, 2009, Apple announced version 3.1 of the iPhone OS, since then 3.1 has been updated to 3.1.2

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