Review of Iphone 3GS

The Iphone 3GS came in on Friday, June 19 at about 2:30 pm,  which was on time, since they said the package would be delivered by 3:00 pm.   The box that the IPhone 3GS comes in is the same as the previous Iphones.  Upon opening the box the Iphone is the first thing you see.  Under that are the earphones, the charger, which is a lot smaller then the previous ones, plus the USB connector.   In one of the sleeves is a small tool used to pop out the Sims card.  There are also instructions, legal paper work and finally the apple stickers.   Now to the Iphone itself.

It is slightly heavier then the original  Iphone.  It is also rounder in the back, most likely to provide room for the video capability and compass.  It is completely glossy black, where as the original one had a silver matted back.  The volume and lock buttons on the side are silver as is the off button on the top.  On the original Iphone they were all black.   Other then those small differences it looks almost exactly the same.

The phone is not charged up when you get it, so that is the first thing you need to do.  You can either do that by using the usb cables and connect it to your computer, or you can use the wall charger.  It took about and hour to charge the phone up, which is pretty fast.  If you do use your computer to charge the Iphone, make sure you have Itunes set up and ready to go.  The connection and process with Apple went without a hitch and was done fairly quickly.  Once you connect with AT&T, you will get a message telling you that they are processing your request.   I received the confirmation that they had finished the registration about 2 hours later.  I do know that some people had trouble with this part of the process and were popping the Sims card from their old Iphone and placing it in the new one to speed up the process.  I wasn’t in any hurry so, I didn’t see a need to do that.   The phone then starts syncing automatically, that process does take sometimes especially if you are syncing a large library.   Once you finish syncing and you’ve received the message back from AT&T your phone is ready to use.

The first new application you will notice is the compass.  The compass can be set for true north or magnetic north.  You click on the icon and Google maps locates you very quickly and accurately.  I suspect this application, will become more usefully once applications like the Tom Tom become available that use its capability.   The Voice control command, while neat in concept, only works sometimes and quickly becomes frustrating. I couldn’t get the voice dialing to work at all and the music activation was iffy.  Plus to activate it you have to push the home button, which is not very convenient if you are driving.  It is not something that I will use very often.  It may get better over time as upgrades come in, so I will try it again later.  The one upgrade that I am impress with is the addition of video capability to the Iphone and the upgrade of the camera to 3 mega pixels. This is a picture I took with the Iphone 3GS I also did a short video, to test the video capability,  which I downloaded to Youtube.  It did take awhile for Youtube to process it, so I also imported it to Vimeo.   It is in  a .mov extension so videos taken this way can easily be edited in Imovie.   I can guarantee that you are going to see a lot of good quality videos go up on Youtube that are made with the Iphone.  A very amusing video on the possibilities is up at  Macbreak with Alex Lindsay of Pixel Corp

There are a couple of things that I have not tried the first is MobileMe and the second is tethering.   I haven’t tried MobileMe because I don’t see the need for it at this time.  Although the locate me, does look interesting.  I am not sure it is worth the $99.00 it would cost.   I have not tried to tether my phone.   I do know that people have tried it and have been successful, but it is unclear what AT&T reaction will be to the unsupported tethering.   I am not willing to take the risk and am willing to wait.   All together I am very happy that I did update to the to the 3GS, now I just have to figure out what I am going to do with the extra 11 gb of space I have on the new Iphone.