iPhone 3GS Supports Full HD 1080p Video Playback

When taking a look at the thin and somewhat... flimsy form factor of the iPhone 3GS, it's rather difficult to picture it as being able to output Full HD video resolutions. I mean, come on, how can this tiny smartphone carry out the same processes your large-size Blu-ray player is capable

On the other hand, if the results were in fact right and the iPhone 3GS does support Full HD video playback, this means that Apple has decided to keep things under wraps yet again, just waiting to “unleash” this functionality in a future firwmare upgrade, and, why not, stifle the HD streaming claims made by Microsoft regarding its future Zune HD model. And that would really mark a huge blow to old MS, one that might bring an abrupt end to the whole Zune thing altogether.

Well, the iPhone 3GS could be a lot more powerful than anyone might have believed up until now, given the fact that it's apparently capable of running 1080p videos just fine, as a Chinese... experimenter, let's say so, seems to have demonstrated.

So, within a post on the Chinese forum Weiphone, a user called “fridtear” (the name might be different altogether, but that's what Google's automatic translation service is offering me right now) claims that he's managed to run H.264, 1080p, 30 Mbps videos (1920 x 1080 pixel resolution) on his iPhone 3GS, without carrying out significant software modifications.

And if you're wondering just what “significant” means in this case, you should know that we're only talking about the installation of a free file transfer and viewing application called FileAid, which enabled the whole transfer and playback process.

However, there are some issues with this claim, the most important one coming from people who've already tried for themselves to recreate the experiment and failed, which raises some serious question marks regarding just how correct those results really were.