iPhone 3GS Hardware Features

Paul Thurrott:

Amazingly, several software features Apple showed off yesterday will arbitrarily not be made available to other iPhone users. These include Voice Control and Compass. What??

The compass app is based on a hardware magnetometer, and my somewhat-informed understanding of Voice Control is that it uses new digital signal processing hardware. Thurrott didn’t complain about it, but the same goes for shooting video, by the way: video is a hardware feature of the 3GS camera, they’re not just snapping 30 frames per second from a still camera and using the CPU to stitch them together into video files.

★ Wednesday, 17 June 2009