iPhone 3G – First Impressions
Posted July 12th, 2008 | 1 Comment
As regular readers will know i’m a fully confessed Apple fanboy. But I am going to be objective about the iPhone 3G.
As great as the iPhone is there are still a couple of downsides and areas for improvement which I will post about tomorrow.
Setup
The setup was as easy as ever with Apple stuff, turn on, connect, enter Apple ID in iTunes, done.
The packaging was also great as expected, I love the little pin to open the SIM card holder!
Phone Quality
I was slightly concerned at the keynote to learn that the shiny silver back had been replaced by black plastic. I need not have been though. It looks amazing! I actually much prefer it and I’m sure it will not show scratches as much as before. The visible screws on the bottom are a surprise for Apple, i’m hoping it means we can change the battery ourselves!
The audio quality is also fantastic, using it for calls, it’s by far the best sound quality i’ve ever experienced from a phone. Totally clean and clear sound.
The built in speaker is also impressive both for speaker phone and ipod usage. Using my Denon headphones the sound quality seems to be even better than my iPod Classic and Nano.
Touch Screen
The touch screen is just amazing. It’s a cliche but it IS the future. Sure there are other touch screen devices around but none as intuitive as this. The pinching and flicking just comes so naturally.
Speed
I have never used a 1st-Gen iPhone for any length of time (the lack of 3G was the main thing that put me off) so I can’t do any comparisons. I can say that browsing ‘real internet’ on my iPhone today was a good experience. The pages took on average 10 – 20 seconds to load which isn’t that much more than basic WAP pages were taking on my k800i.
As soon as I got home and the iPhone picked up my wireless network though, the speeds were blazing!
GPS/Location Awareness
Another killer feature of the i3G is the inclusion of GPS and the amazing stuff that can be done once your phone knows your location!
The obvious 2 of Google Maps and car sat nav. Today I tested Google Maps as I walked which was really impressive an i’m looking forward to TomTom releasing their iPhone SatNav software soon.
The more exciting location awareness features though are just starting to appear. A well known productivity tool OmniFocus is introducing location aware ToDo Lists, so for example you could have a list for home and a list for the office and it would display the correct list depending on your location. You can go further by adding a ToDo item for say buying a pint of milk from a certain place, the iPhone can remind you to do so when you actually arrive at the place!
Other apps allow you to view Flickr photos taken in the areas surrounding your current location, or Wikipedia articles about local features.
I purchased a great App today which displays the nearest Bank/Shop/Pub/Resatrant to you. I will be talking about that in a post on my favourite Apps soon.
The App Store
The final thing t hat really impressed me is The App Store. It’s just like the iTunes store, clean, fast and easy to use and most importantly features some amazing apps already and it’s only day 1!. I have installed many free and paid apps today. After playing with them for a while I will be writing my Top 10 soon.
So the iPhone 3G really is the best video iPod yet, a revolutionary internet device and a very good phone. There are still downsides though, not least the .mac replacement MobileMe which has been chaotic today and taken some of the shine off my iPhone day.
My next post will look at the MobileMe disaster and other areas the iPhone 3G could improve.
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Kun Dang
12.07.08
The speed between the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G is truly amazing. You will can feel the difference right away. But so far the App store is quite disappointing, be interested to see what your top 10 is.
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