At Apple WWDC 2008, Steve Jobs reveals the iPhone 3G with faster download speeds, longer battery life, GPS, a lower price, and a near worldwide release on July 11.

Each unit of the iPhone 3G is costing Apple approximately $173 to assemble and manufacture, writes iSuppli. The research group says it has conducted a preliminary, "virtual" teardown of the phone, based mainly on arguments from internal experts on fields such as cellphones and wireless technology. If the estimate proves accurate it will represent a 23 percent decline in cost from the original 8GB iPhone, which took $226 to make. The reduction is attributed to a drop in the cost of individual parts.
Apple should in fact make a greater profit on the sales of 3G units, says iSuppli, even though the new devices will sell for as little as $199. This is because it believes carriers are paying Apple roughly $300 to subsidize each phone, maintaining or expanding on the margins of the 4GB, $499 iPhone Apple briefly produced. This margin should only expand over time, as the cost of manufacturing naturally declines. It is predicted to slide to $148 in 2009, and if the phone were left untouched, it would cost as little as $126 in 2012.

The iPhone 3G may be a great aid to the pornography industry, writes Time. The current 2.5G unit is already said to popular with porn producers, due to its use of a desktop-like web browser, and better handling of video than most cellphones. "There are a few hundred iPhone porn sites now in use," says the VP of business development at AVN Media Network, Farley Cahen. Google Trends is meanwhile tracking a high use of the search term "iPhone porn."
More producers are said to be gearing up for the launch of the iPhone 3G, due on July 11th. The device will not only make downloading photos and videos more practical away from a Wi-Fi connection, it will reach an expanded audience, arriving in 70 or more countries by the end of the year. Because owners will be able to access porn via the web, they will also be able to circumvent any arbitrary ethics imposed by wireless carriers.
Apple does not condone iPhone pornography, according to spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock, but it cannot stop people from accessing it in some means via Safari. The main safeguard will be the iPhone 2.0 firmware, which will enable parental controls; it is believed though that many parents may not know enough to enable these restrictions, and that children may be able to circumvent them anyway.

Leading up to the first-generation iPhone release last June, Apple launched an aggressive advertising campaign that was hard for anyone to miss. Attractive, feature-specific TV ads for the handset seeemed to run during every popular program, and Apple found ways to get the device into periodicals of all sorts. It may not have sold a million units in its first month on the market, but the iPhone name was everywhere.

This year, Apple and its carrier partners face a much bigger challenge with the iPhone 3G: drumming up hype and spreading product awareness across not one but 22 countries, all at the same time. While iLounge readers in the United States are fairly familiar with the product already, a number of advertisements have popped up all over the globe in preparation for the initial iPhone 3G launch on July 11. We've included some photos of these ads below. (Mexico City photo courtesy of flickr user alenm8816.)