Apple has boosted the speed, battery, camera, and other hardware specs to introduce the iPhone 3G S. The new model will release on June 19 in the U.S. and many other countries in 16GB and 32GB configurations.

U.S. pricing will be $199 and $299 for new and "qualifying" AT&T customers with a new two-year contract. (Apple didn't specify what this means for old iPhone owners.) The iPhone 3G will continue to be sold in an 8GB configuration at a $99 price point.

Apple will roll out the phone to its full list of international customers in the weeks and months following the June 19 launch.

Updated hardware makes the iPhone 3G S about twice as fast as the 3G. Apple demonstrated its benchmarks for launching apps and loading web pages at the WWDC keynote announcement. For example, Apple says SimCity loads about 2.4 times faster than before.

A new, 3MP autofocus camera improves photo quality while adding support for video. Video clips record at 30 frames-per-second, filling 640x480 pixels. You can make simple edits to clips, trimming out bad parts before sending them to friends on YouTube, MobileMe, or through MMS messages. The still camera also can focus as close as 10cm in its macro mode, plus you can "manually" focus on different subjects just by tapping them on-screen.

Other hardware improvements add up. There's a digital compass for navigation that can also orient maps. Nike+ is finally supported in the hardware, without a dongle. HSDPA support gets rolled-in, tapping into faster over-the-air speeds up to 7.2 Mbps, should carriers support that technology.

And Apple claims longer battery times; lasting 9 hours for Wi-Fi Internet, 10 hours for video, 30 hours for audio, 12 hours for 2G talking, and 5 hours for 3G voice.

Software improvements are also bundled with the 3G S and not on the iPhone 3G; we presume they require the faster speed of the hardware... or could Apple also want people to buy new phones?

Voice Control lets you issue spoken commands to call contacts, control music, ask what song is playing, and more. Accessibility features add VoiceOver narration to read out loud, along with tools to zoom and make text clearer.

Business users--or those of us civilians who care about data privacy--finally get data encryption. Coupled with the remote-wipe feature in the 3.0 software update, this iPhone is looking a lot more enterprise-friendly.

Like the bump from the original iPhone to 3G, the 3G S doesn't add any one killer feature. But we look forward to weighing all of these updates and choosing again between the black or white case.