It’s no surprise that Apple’s new phone is selling out across Apple’s US retail stores and even as I passed by the San Francisco Apple Store on my bike today (11 days after launch), a line of over 80 people were waiting at the 9AM store opening to pickup one. I didn’t invent the name, “Jesus-Phone” just search Google and you’ll see iPhone is considered this in the tech world and I’d like to share how Apple’s iPhone 3GS has made a perfect phone, even better and what they did to screw it all up!
It’s no secret that I’m an Apple iPhone Fanboy but I was fully prepared to switch to Palm Pre when it was released last month. After watching the CES demo of Palm’s Pre handheld w/ WebOS I was dead set on purchasing one of these and I simply was going to wait until after Apple’s WWDC to see what they announced to compete with the new revolutionary device from Palm. Well, I decided to stay with Apple when I weighed out a few things.
- I use a Mac (syncs with iTunes, iPhoto, MobileMe) Palm does not offer the experience.
- I’ve bought a ton of apps. I’ve purchased over 100 apps for iPhone. That’s a large investment.
- The PalmPre and its WebOS are untested, brand new and lack a large number of apps or hardware accessories.
On June 19th, I gave Apple another chance and purchased the iPhone 3GS and I’ve been happy. No I haven’t been amazed, excited or wowed as I was with the 1st two generations of the Jesus-Phone but I was happy and that’s what is important, right? Let’s highlight the key features I wanted to highlight & a mix of the key gripes I have with the iPhone 3GS.
- I can record video and send to YouTube, Flickr and Zannel
- The CPU is faster (600MHz) and there’s twice as much RAM (256MBs)
- The capacity is now 32 gigabytes (from 16GB last year)
- The battery life sucks (Apple claimed it was better 1/3 better)
- The OS has evolved but hasn’t seen any major overhauls
- The device itself is unchanged. Weight, form, shape & feel
I hope this is good enough of an organization that you can simply hop around. I’ll try to keep this post short and sweet but I’m already 400 words in so I doubt we’ll keep this quick.
1. OMFG I’M RECORDING YOU IN VIDEO FORMAT! DO ANOTHER KEG STAND! Apple always does a wonderful job of making it easy to find features without truly educating users. The video mode is dead-simple. Open Camera, switch to the icon that looks like a video camera and now you’re recording video. When you stop, it’s easy to preview, trim, send to YouTube or share with a friend via MMS or Email. The phone could be faster at trimming & compressing video but it’s not and that sucks. It’s similar to what you’d expect if doing the same actions on any standard computer using QuickTime Pro but instant would rock. When it comes to getting video out of the phone, you can do so by syncing up over USB but sending over the air means you are at the whim of the 3G speed in your area. A Wi-Fi network will, of course, help video transfer even faster so find a Wi-Fi network if possible because 3G ultimately sucks for uploading video to the web.
A little secret that I’ve discovered over the weekend is services like Zannel, Flickr and even YouTube that accept uploads via Email can receive video from The iPhone 3GS. I can email my video to Zannel with my own custom link and that video is then pushed to Flickr. It’s pretty nifty and it works exceptionally well if you’re not keen on putting video on YouTube. Video looks pretty good for a cell phone, auto-focus is good and sound quality is great. A tip: always hold the iPhone sideways when recording video. Just head my warning because vertical video recording sucks when people on the web are viewing it.
2. Whoa! My porn app runs like 2x as fast now that the iPhone 3GS is faster!!!! YAY BOOBIES!!! Yes, the iPhone 3GS is faster. It’s not as fast as my dual core MacBook Pro but it’s fast enough for a phone. The speed is instantly noticeable when you launch system preferences or Calendar and the screen appears instantly. The real value in this speed boost occurs the monent you launch a 3D game and load times are twice as fast with zero lag during game play. Even a game like Sonic The Hedgehog loaded faster and Sims 3 loaded instantly with zero delay to play my city that has over 800 thousand residents. Yes it’s faster and yes it’s worth it. If you’re looking at that $99 iPhone 3G, it’s worth it to pay $100 and get the speed & video recording. Speed is a huge winner here.
3. WOW I CAN STORE ALL 200 FART APPS, 10 MOVIES AND EVERY STING SONG EVER MADE! 32GBS ROCKS!!! Yeah 32 gigabytes of storage may not be a huge deal since the iPod Touch has had this kind of storage for nearly a year. Yeah it’s not that huge of a deal but doubling my storage was epic for me and for me, Apple can keep increasing storage on and on and on. I downgraded from a 160GB iPod Classic to an iPhone 3G w/ 16Gbs of storage. I went from being able to store all of my music to only storing a few thousand songs. There’s that old-time argument that I don’t need over 500 songs when I leave the house in the morning and I can just simply change them every night but that’s bullshit. How often do you want to come home, spend 25 minutes in iTunes picking out 500 songs for the next day? Exactly. I want to have my music with me or at least top 500 of my favorite songs and change it probably once every month. That’s how most busy, hard-working Americans deal with picking music and adding more storage helps me keep as much music as possible on my device.
4. I was about to finally finish downloading this 1.1 gigabyte movie on the phone wirelessly and the freaking phone died! This plane ride is GOING TO SUCK!!! Yeah, that’s exactly how it is. The worst battery life I got was 5 hours of “usage” before the battery died. The best I got was 8 hours. I would get around 9-12 on my iPhone 3G and it’s noticeably worse now. For example, I wake up every morning, grab my iPhone and read emails before crawling out of bed. I used to do this and using a jailbroken battery percentage counter, would be at 97% after reading for 15 minutes. Now I’m already at 91% when I’m done reading. Yes it’s twice as bad and yeah I’m pretty bummed about that. Luckily, battery packs like the FastMac iV keep me going but it’s extra bulk that I wish Apple would have solved with this update. I’ve calibrated my phone and yeah it’s still a problem. This is one of the reasons I held off doing a review just because I was hoping the battery life would improve.
5. HOLY CRAP I CAN COPY / PASTE & SEARCH FOR THINGS!!! Yeah. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. Everything good and bad about iPhone OS 3.0 is in the phone. There’s nothing much to say really. If you like OS 3.0 then you’ll like the OS. Of course, I wish The iPhone OS had more radical changes but Apple will make some big changes in the next itteration, that’s very likely as Apple has shown historically in the past decade of updates.
6. HEY IS THAT A NEW IPHONE? OH I COULDN’T TELL CAUSE IT’S JUST AS BORING LOOKING AS THE LAST ONE! LAME!!!! Yeah, the iPhone 3GS is unchanged from a cosmetic standpoint. I was hoping to get a thinner design that didn’t have such an ugly curve or boring plastic white shell or such an obvious line where the SIM card goes or that ugly scratch prone shiny metal ring around the front. Maybe change the black space on the iPhone to a gesture area like the Palm Pre or perhaps make the speakers a different shape, thin the device or add a 2nd camera on the front. There’s so many changes that could have been made but they weren’t and yeah I’m pretty bummed. It basically means at least 12 months until a new model comes out but it’s ok. I’d rather have better battery life than a new design anyway.
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Yeah. The iPhone 3GS is worth the upgrade, it’s great but has a few shortfalls. I’ve enjoyed owning it and think it’s finally mature enough with OS 3.0 to compete with other devices and has hardware specs to keep up with demanding apps like games and video recording. A fun “lifestyle device” that can only be called, “The Jesus-Phone”