iPhone 3GS can now Play 1080p HD Video

Apple's iPhone 3GS came with a fanfare and teased everyone with much demanded video recording feature. However, locking down phone's capacity has always been Apple's solution to maintain a longer battery life. Chinese site weiphone.com indicates that iPhone 3GS is capable of playing 720p and 1080p HD video encoded in H.264 format. One doesn't require to jailbreak iPhone since the built-in video player is capable of 1080p HD content playback.

A forum member of the Chinese website named fridtear used FileAid, a free document viewing application

to bypass Apple's restriction. Fridtear was able to play files of 1920x1080 resolution at up to 30 Mbps through built-in player iPhone 3GS. Apple's official iPhone 3GS specifications indicate that video of 640x480 maximum can be played on the device. The 1080p HD content playback wasn't smooth and at times it crashed. We thus assume that the code is not polished and the upcoming iPhone OS 3.1 software update might fix this or maybe lock this function in the iPhone 3GS devices.

Apple is probably aware of this function and would be working to either fix it or let it exist. We wonder if this HD playback has something to do with the HD rentals service in iTunes Store started in March. Probably like the iPhone OS 3.0 update brought purchasing movies from iTunes on iPhone or iPod Touch devices, the 720p/1080p video play back might be another step towards watching multimedia on the move.