14 DAY TRIAL // Softpedia has learned that iOS 5 will bring almost all of its features to iPhone 3GS, the still-supported two-year old handset that packs a 600 MHz ARM processor, and 256 megabytes of RAM.
When iOS 4.0 was announced, Apple dropped support for the original iPhone, but kept the iPhone 3G on board by compromising on a few features that required more processing power and random access memory, like multi-tasking.
As it turned out, even with limited functionality, iOS 4 performed badly on the iPhone 3G - slow performance, battery drain etc. - which prompted Apple to issue a few software updates to alleviate the problems, but no cigar.
[admark=1]Development for the iPhone 3G stopped at iOS 4.2.1, the last supported version of Apple’s mobile OS for this iPhone model.
The sequential iPhone 3GS continues to support iOS 4 well, though it doesn’t handle all of the features quite as good as the iPhone 4, or the fourth-generation iPod touch players equipped with an A4 chip clocked at 1 GHz and double the RAM.
So it was reasonable to assume that Apple would drop iOS 5 support for the two-year old hardware, not wanting to go through a nightmarish development cycle yet again.
But according to Scot Forstall speaking at the WWDC 2011 keynote on Monday, iPhone 3GS remains a supported device under iOS 5.
However, as developers now confirm, some features will not be present on this version of the smartphone.
These include some of the recently announced Safari enhancements, according to one developer who asked to remain anonymous.
However, it is known that some enhancements are specifically compatible with only some devices, like tabbed browsing on the iPad.
A more significant omission in iOS 5 for iPhone 3GS is the editing function thrown in the Camera application, this developer said.
On new generation iPhones and iPod touches, users will get functions like one tap enhance, redeye reduction, and manual cropping.
These require quite a bit of real-time processing that the iPhone 3GS apparently isn’t capable of. So photo editing in Camera.app will not be available on 3GS devices.
Clearly there are other features that get left out, but we’re yet to learn of them.
On the good side, Notification Center works flawlessly on iPhone 3GS, as does iMessage, the Reminders app and pretty much all the rest, this person said.