One Week With My iPhone 3GS

I've had me new iPhone 3GS for a week now and have really come to like it. The biggest thing has been the better performance for basic things. Gone are the problems I saw introduced with 2.2.1 where I was unable to answer or disconnect calls in a timely manner. (Though only missed one call this way, wasn't that the argument Apple used for controlling Apps so tightly?) Where the 3G would pause for a half-second, the 3GS rips right through without a hiccup. Even typing is responsive enough that i can write this entire post on the 3GS comfortably. Especially the new 3.0 Copy-and-Paste process is much faster and more useful. I don't find myself using the Voice Control as I'd expected though. Voice dialing had been a staple of my phone usage on the dumb phones, but here I've grown accustom to jumping into the phone or contact app to do everything so it just isn't ever used. The camera is a surprise though. The tap to autofocus and meter function really makes the camera much more useful. Giving me the power to select the point at which it meters gives me the ability to capture backlit subjects and have them be visible. More surprising though is the quality of the video. Much like the stills from the 3G, I find myself shooting little videos for the instant send capability sending them directly via e-mail or through Tweet Reel. We even used it at the office to submit silly videos to EternalMoonwalk with results rivaling many consumer cameras I've recently used. As for Geocaching I made five finds last Saturday with nothing most than the 3GS. It works as well as the 3G did, just switching screens is a little quicker. The Geocaching app doesn't yet support the compass but iGeoCacher released an update Sunday with support and I look forward to giving that a shot. The one disappointment has been the new screen coating. While it's better it doesn't jeep the screen as free from finger prints as I'd like an it's still difficult to read through the glare in the sun. I'll be adding the anti-glare screen protector to mine very soon. As for the reported heat issues I have noticed them when either radio (3G or WiFi) is running for more than a couple minutes of heavy use, but it's amplified when charging. The battery at the same time. Having only been briefly on the 3G with the 3.0 software I can't really speak to the battery life though. The 3GS does not last as long as the 3G did under 2.2, but under 3.0 even the 3G lost time of usage.i wouldn't have been likely to do the upgrade if my 3G would have behaved itself after rebuilding it, but between the home button not responding and not being permitted to terminate a call for five seconds or more, I really felt I had to do something. Overall it's been a worthy upgrade and I don't have a moment's regret over spending the extra $182 for an unsubsidized phone (I'm only nine months into my contract). I find myself using the iPhone now when I would have grabbed the laptop before and never really pickup the netbook.

I will mention though that I'm still not pleased with many iPhone limitations and will be taking a hard look on about a year at the Palm Pre and Google Android phones. Hopefully both will have more options and better support before then and if so I'm likely to move from the iPhone to one of those. As annoying and costly ad AT&T is though I might stick with them for the 3G GSM service since it allows use of the phone and data as the same time. My understanding is that CDMA (which is what SprintPCS and Verizon use) is not capable of running both services without duplicating radios - one for each. My three big complaints with Apple an the iPhone are the single carrier, lack of background tasks (not even multitasking, just back polling functions are all I need), and their total control over the App store. Who knows though - in a year they might fix those things too.

-- Posted From My iPhone