Many rejoiced when in iPhone OS 3 beta the tethering appeared as a standard feature, only to remain disappointed when it was removed again in beta 5, to never reappear in the iPhone OS 3 Golden Master and final versions.

A new hack is now available to enable this feature without the need of going through the jailbreak procedure. You can easily find many sources now that report the procedure with a simple Google Search.

The new iPhone speed bump is supported by a new CPU (ARM Cortex A8) running 200MHz faster then its predecessor, and is also supported by a more powerful graphics chip: the PowerVR SGX and a much more generous amount of memory. The Ram was doubled from the already noteworthy 128MB of the original iPhone and iPhone 3G to 256MB.

Other changes, according to the iFixit staff, that filmed their own iPhone 3G S tear-down with the video camera on a second iPhone 3G S are reported below. Here is an overview of hardware specifications comparison between the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G and the new iPhone 3G S…

While the iPhone 3G apparently relied on an Infineon chip for its UMTS/HDSPA connectivity and video acceleration, the new model lacks such a chip. The Infineon iPhone 3G chipset was pointed to as the probable cause for the iPhone 3G connectivity issues. Apple has not acknowledged any problems, however, in the new iPhone 3GS no Infineon chip was discovered.

The extended battery life of the new iPhone 3GS is also worth noticing. The battery is is about 6% larger than the iPhone 3G’s battery.

Nearly all of the handset’s components have been relocated to the front side of the main logic board, including the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Flash memory chips. An additional antenna connection near the dock connector was discovered. iPhone’s camera quality is much improved from the iPhone 3G. For example, close-up shots are now possible down to about 5 cm, and the brightness adjusted well when picking a focus area. Meanwhile, a test comparing the time it takes the Google Earth application to load reveals the new iPhone 3G S to be “bit faster than Apple’s claim of 2X speed improvement” over the iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3G’s oleophobic screen “does seem to clean slightly easier than the 3G’s normal screen,” according to the report.

“Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning. With over 50,000 applications available from Apple’s revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than ever.” – Steve Jobs

While benchmarks have shown that Apple’s iPhone 3GS is so fast that it outpaces Palm’s self-proclaimed fastest smartphone, the Pre, also sales of the new iPhone model are breaking speed records: Apple said Monday that it sold over one million iPhone 3GS models during the first three days the handset was on the market.

The new iPhone OS 3.0 was downloaded by six million customers in the first five days since its release.

Back in 2007, the first million iPhones were sold in 74 days, or approximately two and a half months, while last year’s iPhone 3G launch saw a million devices sold in just the first three days. Considering that sales figures reported Monday do not include sales of the newly-priced $99 8GB iPhone 3G, it’s likely this past weekend represented the Apple’s most successful product launch.

Sounds great, but does Rhodes add any additional hurdles that would not be encountered if we used iPhone SDK?

The iPhone SDK is Apple’s native development environment. There are still some areas of the SDK that are cloudy, like those nice undocumented features you are not allowed to use. There are functions and APIs that became obsolete with the release of the iPhone OS 3.0 SDK while a lot of new stuff is being built in over time.

However it’s all official so you get some guarantees: your software will be backward compatible with older phones as long as you build it on top of APIs available to iPhone OS 2.2.1 and the new OS 3.0, and you can easily upgrade your calls from OS 2 to OS 3 because everything is well documented, at least compared to the competitors’ development environments.

Rhodes is a new framework. It is built by a small company (compared to Apple) which hasn’t a 100% guaranteed future in the years to come (hey Rhomobile, we do wish you all the best!) and it will probably see the same issues in framework versioning as Rails. When a new version of the framework comes out there may be significant changes to the core features to require a partial rewrite of the app to update it to the new structure.

It may also become necessary to keep up-to-date with new Rhodes framework releases if Rhomobile won’t update older versions to keep it compatible with the new iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile releases.

There are a ton of variables when dealing with multiple platforms that you don’t have when dealing with iPhone SDK only. However, the effort of updating the app in 6 to 12 months is likely in the iPhone market as well — as this year’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference has taught us.

With Rhodes you get the added value of updating your code perhaps once every year and deliver to all instead of having the need to update once every year or so for each platform.

Rhodes is also likely to add support for more platforms as they become available: ie. there are rumors for a new Blackberry smartphone that will be nearer to current Android phones and the iPhone in terms of screen size and resolution.

The only real limitation with Rhodes is that it has issues in dealing with multimedia (audio and video). It works fine with still images and databases. It should be even better suited then the iPhone SDK to work with websites since it relies on web technologies.

Another important fact to keep in mind, as pointed out by one of our readers, is that you are limited by the browser capabilities each mobile platform makes available (ie. Windows Mobile 2003 may not be able to use some AJAX facilities).

The other show stopper for you may be the licensing model. Rhodes is free for open-source apps but Rhomobile asks for a percentage (around 5%) of the actual earnings for all commercial apps. The percentage is not calculated on the public App Store price: it’s calculated on your actual income, taking into account Apple’s commissions on the sales.

Apple is working to keep attention on the iPhone’s software, without any mention of the make or specification of its internals. The iPhone 3G S focuses on hardware performance improvements with a faster general purpose ARM and PowerVR graphics processor cores and increase in its internal RAM from 128MB to 256MB. Even if Apple has kept the internal specifications of the iPhone hidden, they won’t be secret for long once the device goes on sale.

For marketing reasons Apple focuses on the unique software capabilities of the iPhone, including its ability to run the 50,000 titles on the App Store, which are more important sale points than the hardware specifications.

“iPhone 3G S is the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet and we think people will love the incredible new features including autofocus camera, video recording and the freedom of voice control,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “And with a breakthrough price of $99, we are thrilled to get iPhone 3G into the hands of even more users who want them.” Apple also achieved a longer battery life even with the added horsepower, so you can watch more videos, listen to more music, browse the Internet and use your favorite iPhone Native Apps longer.

During its presentation at WWDC Monday, Apple highlighted new pricing for the iPhone 3G and the upcoming iPhone 3G S model but apparently existing iPhone 3G customers will have to pay a $200 premium to upgrade to the latest model if they want one right away. iPhone 3G S is priced $199 for the 16GB model and $299 for the 32GB model: current users who bought their iPhone 3G shortly after its launch last year will have to wait a year from their iPhone 3G purchase date to qualify for the new price.

Here is the Apple Guided Tour for the new iPhone.