Apple iPhone 3G reviews and coverage | - latest news,

7th April 2009 Author: Meraj Chhaya - - Views:

 

The Apple iPhone 3G has been officially launched, as well as the MobileMe program, the Apple App Store, and the release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware. There is a lot to cover: first we will head on to the unboxing, then proceed to live images of the device itself and important notes from reviews, cover the software and the ability to unlock the iPhone OS 2.0 firmware, select the top ten applications and games for the iPhone 3G from the App Store, and end up blowing the old iPhone. Stay tuned!

We get images all the way from China to the United States of America. The first images appeared at iPhone Portugal (it had to be our country) but were soon taken off from the forum.

iPhone 3G 16GB Black images, courtesy of ePrice [via iTech News Net via Engadget Mobile]:

The photos below are from the Apple iPhone 3G in white from Mobile 01 [via Slashphone]

In case you are not happy with the White and Black varieties of the iPhone, you could always get yourself one dripping of white gold and diamonds from Goldstriker [source: Textually]:

Now that we have looked at the outside, let's take a look at the "insides". iFixIt has taken apart the Apple iPhone 3G straight after launch. I suggest you to read their guide if you want to learn how to take apart the iPhone 3G or how to repair the iPhone 3G [via 2dayBlog via UberGizmos]

Below is the iPhone 3G's battery. Once again, there is no removal cover for the battery, so if you want a replacement you will have to send it all the way to Apple and pay a hefty US$86 (atleast in the US).

Time to move to the most interesting bit in my opinion: the reviews. It's always good to know what the industry experts think of the new iPhone. Should you buy it? Why yes or why no?

First up is Stuff.tv with their video hands-on iPhone 3G [via MacRumours], and next is David Pogue from The New York Times.

Pogue insists that the iPhone's audio clarity has improved, and it takes the iPhone 3G's sound quality between the world's best:

The third improvement is audio quality, which has taken a gigantic step forward. You sound crystal clear to your callers, and they sound crystal clear to you. In fact, few cellphones sound this good.

Another improvement is the shape of the device, and the addition of a 3.5mm jack for non-Apple earphones. Pogue writes that the iPhone 3G fits the hand better as it's more curved:

[...] the new iPhone feels even better in your hand, thanks to a gracefully curved, shiny plastic back. It also has a standard headphone jack — hallelujah! — so no clunky adapter is required for your favorite non-Apple headphones.

Now a disavantadge to the iPhone 3G is its GPS, as its antenna is too small to calculate accurate positions. Even the N95 had problems in its first firmware release, but that was due to the lack of AGPS. What is Apple going to blame that on?

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Picture: Engadget

That isn't the only problem. Software-wise there aren't many changes besides the Apple App Store which we spoke about yesterday. The defects from the first iPhone continue in this edition, as written by the author:

There’s still no voice dialing, video recording, copy-and-paste, memory-card slot, Bluetooth stereo audio or phone-to-phone photo sending (MMS)

Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal has reviewed the iPhone 3G as well, where he discusses the disadvantages and advantages of purchasing the new device, or upgrading from the previous iPhone. Mossberg finds the following flaws:

While you can have both personal and Exchange email accounts on the new iPhone, if you synchronize with Exchange calendars and contacts, your personal calendar and contacts are erased.

[...]

There’s no copy and paste function, no universal search, no instant messaging and no MMS for sending photos quickly between phones.

[...]

In my test of voice calling, I got 4 hours and 27 minutes, short of Apple’s maximum claim and nearly three hours less than what I recorded in the same test last year on the original iPhone.

[...]

in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20% by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

Mossberg also mentioned the various advantages of going for the iPhone 3G, such as the 3G and WiFi, and the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync service. But his bottom line doesn't show much excitement, and it seems advisable rather to stay with the first version and upgrade it to the new 2.0 Operating System:

If you’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone until it dropped in price, or ran on faster cell networks, you might want to take the plunge, if you can live with the higher service costs and the weaker battery life. The same goes for those with existing iPhones who love the device but crave faster cellular data speeds. But if you already own an iPhone, and can usually use Wi-Fi for data, you probably should hold off and get the free software upgrade before deciding whether it’s worth getting the new hardware.

There were also some comments at Mossberg's review which provided useful insight on the iPhone 3G's functionality:

the iPhone has bluetooth, but it STILL won’t allow you to use the Apple wireless keyboard. Not everyone wants to peck on the screen like a demented chicken, so adding this capability via a firmware update would be greatly appreciated by any business user that wants to compose an email of more than a paragraph or two. Even creating this comment would be laborious in the extreme on the iPhone, but painless with the bluetooth keyboard.

by Stewart Midwinter

The 3G iPhone is wider, thicker and longer than the original.
Apple made it appear thinner by slimming the edges, just like the MAC Air.

by Nik Levy

my wife is cheating on me with the mailman because he has a an iPhone. What should I do?

by John Bosa

Edwarg Baig from USA Today review the iPhone 3G as well, and in his opinion, the iPhone 3G is totally worth it. He moans about the lack of a hardware keyboard, but says that most people should get used to it with practice:

IPhone 3G still lacks a physical keyboard, too. You'll have to get comfortable with "tapping," "flicking," "pinching" and other finger-typing tricks with its virtual keyboard, which only appears on the screen as required — when you are entering a Web address, for instance, or typing a note.

With practice, I've gotten pretty good at it. A big challenge is learning to trust it as it makes predictive auto-corrections on the fly. But it's not for everybody.

Besides noting the advantages covered in this and in previous article regarding the iPhone, Baig is not happy with the same old camera:

But Apple hasn't done much to improve its 2-megapixel camera. You still can't zoom, shoot video or use a flash. Taking pictures is a tad clumsy.

Thankfully you can geotag the pictures and see them on a map on the computer, unlike Nokia phones, where you have to upload them to a photo service:

But the presence of GPS means pictures can be "geo-tagged" with the location in which they were taken. After syncing images with a computer, you might plot their location on a map. Geotagged pictures ought to work well with social-networking applications.

Other new features are the ones of Parental Control and small charger. The author finishes the review by criticizing the lack of a memory card support, Flash, WMV and Java, but he still gives it a positive rating:

As with its predecessor, iPhone 3G doesn't support popular Web browsing standards such as Adobe Flash, Windows Media Video or Java. And there's still no removable battery.

I'd have also loved Apple to add a slot for expandable memory. It did not.

While not everything on my wish list made it onto the new device, Apple has raised the bar with iPhone 3G. To which I offer an enthusiastic thumbs up.

Review links via MobileBurn

Continuing with the software bit, here is the changelog for the OS 2.0 software, courtesy of iPhone Atlas:

• • Third-party application support
  • New App Store
    • Push email
    • Push contacts with Global Address List lookup
    • Push calendars with meeting invites
    • Passcode Policies
    • Remote Wipe
    • Autodiscovery (Exchange Server 2007)
  • Cisco IPSec VPN support
  • WPA/WPA2 Enterprise with 802.1x authentication
  • Certificates and identities support
  • Device configuration with Configuration Profiles
  • MobileMe support
    • Push email
    • Push contacts
    • Push calendars
    • Bookmarks
  • Mail, Contacts and Calendars enhancements
    • Mass delete and move of messages
    • Microsoft PowerPoint and iWork attachment viewing
    • Blind carbon copy (bcc) support
    • Easier POP/IMAP account setup
    • Multiple calendars
    • Display meeting invitees
    • Contacts search
    • Import SIM contacts
    • New Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings
  • Save images to photo library from Safari and Mail
  • Scientific calculator in landscape mode
  • Parental controls/restrictions
  • New languages, dictionaries, keyboards and input methods
  • Turn Wi-Fi back on while in Airplane Mode
  • Tapping the status bar scrolls to top of page
  • Sync Google contacts with iTunes
  • Bug fixes

Gizmodo went over the iPhone 2.0 Operating system, here are some of the important details

• Besides the Phone application, there is a Contact application that does what Phone already allows you to do, which is search contacts
• There are multiple calendars on the phone
• Improved password fields, which now show what letter you typed before turning it into a asterisk
• Calculator changes to scientific mode when the phone is tilted to landscape mode
• Photos are geotagged
• Google and other email services do not benefit from push email, like Yahoo and MobileMe do
• International keyboard support
• Built in screen capture feature:

Hold the "home" button, then hit the "power/sleep" button, and presto, a capture of your screen is in your photos. This doesn't work in the 1.1.4 or earlier versions, so you'll need to upgrade, but chances are you already have.

Before I go anywhere else with this "review", let me just tell you how to upgrade your iPhone with the 2.0 firmware, here's some information retrieved from IntoMobile:

To install the new firmware, download the .ipsw file here. Then connect your iPhone to your computer and fire up iTunes. Under the iPhone tab, Option+Click (on a Mac) or Ctrl+Click (on a PC) on the "Update" button. You'll want to choose the firmware file that you just downloaded, and wait for iPhone 2.0 OS to install on your iPhone.

In case you are only willing to use your 2.0 software once it's jailbroken, fear no more, the iPhone Dev Team have succeeded with the hack, and are readying themselves to release it to the feature. The chaps at Gizmodo have been using it for some time now in order to test the new applications on the old iPhone.

As we are talking about the software advantages and disadvantages, let's look at Engadget's notes on the iPhone 3G that other publications haven't covered:

• As mentioned, Google Maps now shows a pinging blue locator that can track your movement. As of right now there's no way to convert this to KML or anything usable for geocaching.
• The camera will also now ask you permission to use GPS to geotag photos with your current location. Once you grant that permission, it will add the necessary standard EXIF data to your photos. Trés useful, but you can't refer back to those geotags to bring up a location in Google Maps.
• Side note: there's now an option to reset location notifications, if you accidentally granted permission to an app you don't want knowing where you are.
• The iPhone can now read PowerPoint, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote documents. It's still incapable of editing or creating new documents, however, and outside of sending yourself these files via email, there's no accessible file storage.
• You can now save images from the web to your camera roll by tapping and holding.
• Entering passwords is a little easier -- the last character you entered is temporarily shown at the end of the string. Keeps things safe but makes sure you know if you mistyped.
• One of the very first things we ever requested the iPhone see fixed is finally fixed: calendar colors are now supported, meaning you can finally visually tell your appointments apart based on calendar.
• You can now control email, contact, and calendar fetching from system settings, giving you granular control over push and pull data on your various accounts.
• Doing a hard reset now fully purges the device's memory, thereby making it much more difficult to recover the kind of data you don't want someone else recovering

The next notes describe what they think is been left out of the phone, but we only show you the ones we haven't spoken about yet:

• A2DP (stereo Bluetooth). If this was an unlikely addition before, it's all but written off now. A2DP is a notorious battery hog on devices like cellphones, and the iPhone is already pushing the limits on power conservation and efficiency. It pains us to say it, but we just don't see A2DP happening any time soon.
• Service-independent device to machine wireless syncing. Exchange and MobileMe are nice, but even nicer would be a way to easily sync data directly to your machine without having to pay or have some kind of service.
• Tethered data. Hey, you're paying $30 a month for data (likely more if you're using it outside the US), your laptop should be able to use some of it too.
• No way to open a link in a new tab in mobile Safari. We also wish the browser was still a bit better about caching data, too -- it'd be nice not to have to do so many reloads when switching between tabs or moving back and forward through history.

We are heading to the final stage of our "review", let's look at the iPhone users' favourite applications and games, first up is David Pogue, from The New York Times:

One coming program, called iCall, will give you free phone calls when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot. Another, called G-Park, exploits G.P.S. to help you find where you parked. Yet another, Urbanspoon, is “a cross between a magic eight ball and a slot machine:" you shake the phone, and it randomly displays the name of a good restaurant nearby, using the iPhone’s G.P.S. and motion sensor.

You can also expect to see a time and expense tracker, home-automation remote control, voice recorder, Etch-a-Sketch, a recipe box, tip calculator, currency converter, e-book reader and so on.

AppleInsider compiled the most interesting lists of best applications and best games for the iPhone 3G:

Applications

• Apple iTunes Remote
• AIM
• Facebook
• Google Mobile App
• eBay Mobile
• Weather Bug
• Twitterrific
• The New York Times
• MySpace Mobile
• AOL Radio

Games

• Super Monkey Ball
• Enigmo
• Cro-Mag Rally
• Texas Hold'em
• Bejeweled 2
• Bomberman Touch
• Moto Race
• Trism
• Aqua Forest
• Ms. PAC-MAN

Last but not atleast, we have an idea of what you can do with your old iPhone [source: JAMP blog]:

 

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