See all posts in the archives

iPhone 3G S | The Review

20 June, 2009

Topic by Topic

Packaging
Like anything from Apple it was nice - find an un-boxing vid if you want specifics. Was disappointed to see there was no grease removal rag, but decided to give the new oleophobic screen a chance.

Form Factor
It really is the same as a 3G, which is to say, it looks much better than a 2 year old original iPhone. I went black, and with how it looks next to my late 2009 Macbook Pro and my silver and black Canon XSi, I'm very glad I did.

Activation
Despite the reports of people having problems or delays mine activation was simple - maybe 10 minutes from holding the box to the phone saying it was activated. I think that's not bad when you take into account that I did one final backup of the old iPhone before I plugged the new one in. Transferring all my files did take a long time, I miss firewire from the old iPods - a Firewire 800 to iPod cable would be wonderful.

First Impressions
I never knew how much my old phone sucked. This thing makes everything faster. I remember reading somewhere that a big bottleneck for mobile safari on the old iPhones was the processor not being able to render fast enough, but I always assumed that my connection was just too slow for that to be an issue. I was wrong. Loading any web page is dramatically faster than an original iPhone - even on WiFi.

Screen
Colors a much warmer than my other iPhone, it threw me off for a while. Still crisp, no dead pixels.

Compass
On it's own it's a "meh" feature, but with the GPS and maps app this is awesome. It's very responsive - I walked around a little bit using it and the feeling I got was that it was like using the map view in a video game... very cool.

Camera
Still not the best camera in the world, but I suppose it's not supposed to replace a DSLR.... The touch to focus/set light-balance feature is very cool and helps to fix some of cameras short comings. As far as video - the quality is about what I'd expect based on the still camera's performance. But as a note, the app launches fast, so it will be very useful to capture video at short notice.

Graphics
Many times better. Crisper, faster, everything about this phone says it will be a great gaming device - Monkeyball looks considerably smoother on the new phone - I don't have many other games to test at the moment, but after seeing the change it makes I definitely will.

Voice Control
Maybe I mumble too much, but this didn't work to well for me. The only command I had no problems with was "who sings this" so I guess that's a start...

Other Notes
- My (very expensive) 3rd party headphones had their click/mic functionality broken - not sure if this is global for all third party headphones, but I hope this is fixed in an update.

-I wish the 3.0 OS had a "search in Google" feature added to the copy/paste menu, i'd like to be able to copy a word and google it - a wikipedia tie in like the Mac OS dictionary app would be nice too.

Verdict

This thing is much faster than the 2G and 3G iPhones - and it does video - if you qualify for the ATT loan (it's not a subsidy when you pay it back, don't pretend it is) get one. You'll love it.