What an ingenious piece of technology. The iPhone 3G is one heck of a mobile phone, if you can even call it that!
The new iPhone 3G is tugging the heart strings of the business market with iPhone’s Exchange enterprise. Add to that the long-awaited 3rd party application support and App Store and you now have a viable computing platform.
The hardware
An identical face to the iPhone, it also maintains the bright, high quality, high resolution 480 x 320 3.5-inch display. Unfortunately, it’s still every bit as much a prone to smudges and fingerprints, even more so now that the rear of the device has dropped its chic matte aluminum in favor of black (or white, optional on the 16GB model) solid plastic. With the body shape changed, thicker at its center and tapered at the edge, there are a couple of downsides. First, when you’re tapping off-center on a hard, flat surface, the phone wobbles. Second, the new shape means you can’t be using it in your original device’s dock as they are incompatible. They now want you to buy that separately. iPhone 3G calls made over 3G and GSM both sounded significantly better than calls made on the original iPhone. Of course, call quality most often depends on 3G and GSM networks depending on where you are. The iPhone 3G’s battery life peg it at 10 / 5 hours talk on GSM / 3G (respectively), 5 hours 3G data, 6 hours WiFi, 24 hours music and 7 hours video. If you’re one who reads feeds and checks email like a fiend, by 3 or 4pm you may be wondering if you’ll even make it home with any power left — especially if you leave on the 3G data. The prolonged usage you got with the original iPhone probably isn’t possible with the iPhone 3G. The camera produced sharper pictures compared to its predecessor, though it has retained the 2 megapixels. The speaker volume has been jacked up significantly, giving your calls (or music) a much more workable volume level. Unfortunately, it’s still mono.
The software
The major addition to the iPhone 3G (as well as the original iPhone and iPod touch) is the App Store, which finally enables users to jazz up their phone with whatever programs make it through Apple’s rigorous developer screening and software testing process The applications themselves vary in price, and are purchased after you’ve logged in with your iTunes account. Applications fewer than 10MB download over the air, and are immediately deposited in your first available slot, where they can be moved (or removed) as you see fit. As new versions of the apps become available, the App Store notifies you of updates and manages the downloads. Another new addition is character recognition support for logographic-based languages, such as Traditional Chinese, as well as localised keyboards for nearly two dozen languages and markets worldwide. However, the touchscreen keyboard can still be a major sticking point for some and Apple hasn’t given any more of its default programs (like SMS) the increased ease of typing that comes with using the keyboard in landscape mode. There’s simply no question that in terms of efficiency, on an iPhone we’re nowhere close to where we can get on a spacious (or even not so spacious) QWERTY keypad. Then there is the issue with MobileMe. It would choke on sync and require disabling / re-enabling to keep that sync moving. Another problem was that email deletes weren’t requiring the same message be deleted in multiple locations. Besides that, it only gets updates at a minimum, every minute, because it’s actually pulling them. On the other hand, we found the Exchange support to be simple enough to set up and use that you may not have to bug your IT dude. Some hardcore enterprise users will miss the full Exchange suite, including synced notes and tasks, but the core functionality (email, calendar, contacts) work very well. Our biggest gripe with Exchange isn’t small: the system is unable to let enterprise contacts and calendars coexist on the same device with personal contacts and calendars.