Over the weekend multiple reports surfaced that the display on the iPhone 3G had a noticeable yellow hue. Now it has been revealed that the increase in warmness is an intentional move by Apple.

Jason Snell over at Macworld spoke to Bob Borchers, Apple’s senior director of iPhone product marketing.

“Borchers indicated that this definitely isn’t a bug or a display defect. Yes, the display on the iPhone 3G has a warmer look—and that’s by design. The previous iPhone’s white was more of a cool blue (Borchers likened it to harsh fluorescent lighting), while this one’s is warmer and more of a sunny yellow,” reports Macworld.

Borchers continued, “We moved the white point in order to make [the display feel] more natural”

According to research by Richard Baguley the new iPhone’s color temperature is between 6800 and 7300 Kelvins, compared with a color temperature of about 8300K on the original iPhone.

Following the discovery of the yellow displays many began reporting that an updated version of the 2.0 firmware could fix the non-issue.

Today, John Gruber writes on his popular blog that updating the firmware is effectively pointless and it certainly doesn’t make any changes to the iPhones display white point.

Images courtesy of Mat Honan.