What Are the iPhone's "Generations"?

If you read about technology long enough - especially mobile phone technology - eventually you're going to hear about "generations."  For example, one article might write that a gadget has vastly improved over a previous "generation," or that they expected more out of this "generation" of gadget.  But what does “generation” mean, and how does it apply to Apple's popular smart phone, the iPhone?

Isn't a phone just a phone?

Not quite.  If you really want to dig deeper, you'll find out that the iPhone has actually lived through three generations.  The original release date, back in the summer of 2007, saw people waiting in lines for their iPhones.  Subsequent releases of the iPhone - which included updates and upgrades over the original - have been released each summer to date.  So what are these generations exactly?

First generation:

Simply the iPhone, you could call the first generation the "original" in the series.  Released on June 29th, 2007, the iPhone put the mobile phone market ahead and was so popular that many companies have been fighting to keep up ever since.  The original iPhone had a storage capacity of up to 16 GB; the current "generation" can have storage up to 32 GB.

Second generation:

The iPhone 3G, released in the summer of 2008, was a step forward from the original iPhone.  With faster data speeds (for using the Internet) and an assisted GPS, the upgrade saw an even more streamlined version of the original.

Third generation:

The current incarnation of the iPhone, the 3G S, was released just this past summer.  With a storage capacity up to a possible 32 GB, the 3G S has more flexibility than the previous two "generations" of iPhones.

If you're buying the latest version of the iPhone, you're not buying what originally came out in 2007.  Technology amateurs might think that the iPhone has stayed the same - after all, they look the same - but when you look further into it, you discover that there are some big differences from the first generation to the current generation.

There are good and bad things that come with these quickly-arriving new generations.  It can be a little disheartening to buy an iPhone, only to have it become an "older" generation just a year later.  But it also means that older versions of the iPhone become cheaper as the demand for newer one increases.