iOS 6 Extended To iPhone 3GS

Apple will offer the new iOS 6 upgrade on all previous iterations of the iPhone. Only the original iPad will be excluded from the update – all 4th-gen iPod Touch devices will get the bump up in functionality, as will the lowly iPhone 3GS, launched nearly five years ago. The new update promises more than 200 new features , and Apple’s iOS 6 Maps app is the new flagship app, complete with 3D modelling similar to the recent Google Earth upgrade. Like Google Maps, iOS 6 Maps also ushers in turn-by-turn navigation, which can be voice-controlled on the iPhone 4S and new iPad via Siri. Photostreams can now be shared and uploading photos has been simplified with a new tool in Safari which gets around the need to install third-party apps to get your snaps onto the Web.

Elsewhere, Apple was keen to stress the successs of app developers on its iOS platform at last week’s WWDC, with downloads from the Apple App Store now having passed the billion mark. The develoopers who sit coding into the early hours have now reaped $5 billion in revenues from the iOS portal, which translates to $1 for every six downloads of an app. That ought to motivate devs to get an app into the App Store and hopefully on the featured page for an explosion in demand. Apple CEO TIm Cook beams that the App Store is

‘the most vibrant ecosystem on the planet’

, taking a swipe at the Android palette, with its ‘few hundred’ tablet-optimized apps, compared to the 225,000 apps specifically tailored for use on the iPad. As Cook said at the WWDC last week,

‘Nothing makes users happier than to see hundreds of thousands of devs around the world using our hardware and software to share their latest and greatest ideas’

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