Everything I needed to know about iPhones — or everything I already knew — came to me in an instant:
The iPhone is an Internet and multimedia enabled smart-phone 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 3.6Mbps HSDPA; the third generation adds support for 7,2Mbps HSDPA downloading but remains limited to 384Kbps uploading as Apple had not implemented the HSPA protocol. The iPhone 3GS was announced on June 8, 2009, and has improved performance, a camera with more megapixels and video capability, and voice control.
Manufacturer
Apple Inc.
Type
Candybar smartphone
Release date
Originaclass="underline" June 29, 2007
3G: July 11, 2008
3GS: June 19, 2009
Units sold
21.17 million (as of Q2 2009)
Operating system iPhone OS 3.1.2 (build 7D11),
released October 8, 2009
Power
Originaclass="underline" 3.7V 1400mAh
3GS: 3.7V 1219mAh
Internal rechargeable non-removable lithium-ion polymer battery
CPU
Original & 3G: Samsung 32-bit
RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.o
3G: 3.7V 115omAh
620MHz underclocked to 412MHz PowerVR MBX Lite 3D GPU
3GS: Samsung S5PC100 ARM
Cortex-A 8
833MHz underclocked to 600MHz PowerVR SGX GPU
Storage capacity
Flash memory
Originaclass="underline" 4, 8, & 16GB
3G: 8 & 16GB
3GS: 16 & 32GB
Memory
Original & 3G: 128MB eDRAM
3GS: 256MB eDRAM
Display
320 x 48opx, 3.5m (89mm), 2:3 aspect ratio, 18-bit (262,144-colour)
LCD at 163 pixels per inch (ppi)
Input
Multi-touch touchscreen display,
headset controls, proximity and ambient light sensors,
3-axis accelerometer
3GS also includes: digital compass
Camera
Original & 3G: 2.0 megapixels with geotagging
3GS: 3.0 megapixels with video
(VGA at 3ofps), geotagging,
and automatic focus, white balance, &; exposure
Connectivity
WiFi (8o2.nb/g), Bluetooth
2.0+EDR (3GS: 2.1), USB 2.o/Dock connector
Quad band GSM 850 900 1800 1900
MHz GPRS/EDGE
3G also includes: A-GPS; Tri band
UMTS/HSDPA 850, 1900, 2100MHz
3GS also supports: 7.2Mbps HSDPA
Online services iTunes Store, App Store. MobileMe
Dimensions
Originaclass="underline"
115mm (4.5m) (h)
61 mm (2.4m) (w)
11.6mm (0.46m) (d)
3G & 3GS:
115.5mm (4.55m) (h)
62.1mm (2.44m) (w)
12.3mm (0.48m) (d)
Weight
Original & 3GS: 135g (4.80Z)
3G: 133g (4.70Z)
Actually, that was far more information than I needed, and most of it didn't make much sense to me anyway. But it confirmed what I'd already assumed: I had WiFi capability, I could connect to the web. I had access to every single website in the world, which is a lot of websites:
Web pages in the world, August 2005:19.2 billion pages were indexed by Yahoo as of August 2005.
Websites in the world, August 2005: 70,392,567 websites were indexed by Netcraft as of August 2005.
Web pages per website: 273 (rounding to the nearest whole number).
Web pages in the world, February 2007: multiplying our estimate of the number of web pages per website by Netcraft's February 2007 count of websites, we arrive at 29.7 billion pages on the World Wide Web as of February 2007.
And there was even more. There were databanks, secure sites, programs and websites that were supposed to be inaccessible to unauthorized users, but my iBrain knew how to get into them.
My iBrain, my iSelf ...
My i.
What else did it allow me to do? Well, I could send and receive texts and calls, of course ... and, what's more, I seemed to be able to phone and text with complete anonymity. So, if I wanted to, I could send texts and make calls without anyone knowing who they were from.
And I could hear other calls too. I could access other mobiles — stored texts, call logs, address books ... whatever was there. I knew it all. I knew where the phones were. I could either triangulate their signals or, with a lot of the new phones, simply locate them via their GPS chips. I could reach out into the radio-waved air and pick out a single specific telephone conversation from among all the millions of others ...
What else?
I could take pictures — click.
Make videos — click, whirr.
Watch videos, watch TV, play games.
I could see every email on every computer and every phone in the world.
I could download everything downloadable ...
I could do virtually anything.
I could overdose on information.
I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness for a while, emptying my head of everything. I was drained, exhausted. My skull ached. I was excited, confused, bewildered, thrilled ...
This ... whatever and however it was ...
This was awe-inspiring.
A radio-controlled clock inside my head (receiving its time signal over the air from Anthorn in Cumbria [MSF 6okHz]) told me that it was 23:32:43.
I lifted my hands and held them in front of my face. A soft glow was emanating from my skin — a gentle, very pale, almost purplish light. I watched, oddly unsurprised, as the glow started to shimmer, and my skin began pulsating again ... radiating, floating, swirling with the essence of everything. I didn't have to see the rest of my body to know that it was happening all over — I could feel it. And now that I was witnessing it up close for the first time, I knew what it was. It was everything, the same kind of everything that I had in my head: 30 billion web pages, galaxies of words and pictures and sounds and voices ... all of it shimmering in and over and under my flesh.
And now I could control it.
All I had to do was switch something off in my head (I didn't know what it was), and my skin would fade back to normal; switch it on again, and the cyber-galaxies came back.