The new iPhone 3G S was released on Friday, and I was there near the front of the line to be among the first (several thousands of) people to get one. Prior to this, I had a really cheap Samsung flip-phone, and before that I had an LG version of the RAZR, on which I really loved the rotating camera — a feature that I haven’t seen since, unfortunately. That is to say, I have never had a particularly nice phone before, and because I’m going back to school for Computer Science in the fall, I figured a smartphone was just what I needed to help me stay on top of my game.
I took a look at the Palm Pre, the Blackberry Storm, the G1, upcoming G2, previous models of the iPhone, and other competition — and I can’t quite see why people love to shit all over the iPhone. In fact, most people I talk to who “hate” the iPhone or say they are “against” or “anti” iPhone, cite their reason as being “oh I hate the brand recognition,” “oh it’s too popular/trendy.” So they hate the phone because people like it. Great reason.
A more valid reason to hate the iPhone may be because of how tightly Apple and AT&T lock it down. You can’t even develop and run apps *you write* on *your own* device, without a $100/year developer’s license, a Mac computer to test your apps on, etc. Jailbreaking is a very common means around this, although people feel as though they should not have to violate the TOS of their contract (and potentially the DMCA) in order to do this. I agree completely, however I feel that the iPhone on its own — that is, unrestricted — trumps the other phones beyond a doubt, and even in its current state provides features that, for me, are not replaceable by the other devices.
Anyway, now that I’ve had time to play with the new iPhone for a couple days, here are my initial impressions.
1. Camera. Photography is one of my hobbies, and I do have some professional photographic equipment laying around the house. I understand that even dedicated point and shoot cameras will never match the quality of a solid DSLR, let alone the camera on a cell phone (let alone an American cell phone). That said, I do not feel that the camera in the iPhone is anything particularly special. Yes, it now has 3 megapixel auto-focus, etc like many of the newer phones coming out, but increased megapixels does not necessarily mean increased quality. I have found that so far, the white balance is a bit off, and the camera seems to either make things way too white, or very dark and grainy.
The settings on the phone itself do not provide any means to adjust any settings, which is terrible. As far as I know, I can’t zoom, I can’t correct colors/light. . .really I can’t do anything, except choose where the focus will be. Hopefully this will be corrected in a later version of the firmware, but who knows.
Along similar lines, there is a very annoying “camera noise” that is played when you snap a picture. This can be disabled by flipping the mute switch on the phone, but there is — to my knowledge — no other way to turn this off, which is highly annoying. Rumour has it that Apple did this to prevent covert photography (some people like to stick their phones under girls’ miniskirts and snap photos), but not only should this not be on Apple to take care of, I feel that I’m being treated like a criminal for having a camera phone.
2. New hardware. I have spent a good deal of time messing around with the iPhone 3G in the Apple store, and I do feel that the improved graphics, processor, and memory are very noticeable. Graphics-intense applications run very smoothly on my phone, and I’m very impressed overall with this aspect.
One thing that fellow hackers might like to note, is that the new processor has built-in MicroSD capabilities. Some modifications to the phone, or add-ons which can be attached through the charger port (which also now had expanded capabilities due to the 3.0 release of the OS), may allow for expanded storage to compensate for the lack of MicroSD port.
Unfortunately, the new processor makes use of AES256 encryption all the way down the line, which will make jailbreaking especially difficult for this phone. One worthwhile avenue to pursue will be to follow the advice of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and write to the Copyright Office about why the ability to legally jailbreak the phone is important. You wouldn’t want to pay HP/Dell/etc a ton of money and get special approval to have to run your own software on the computer you bought, would you? So why is it any different with Apple?
Finally, the oleophobic screen is pretty nice. At first I couldn’t tell if it actually worked, but it’s pretty clear now that wiping the screen on your sleeve briefly does indeed remove all fingerprints etc. which is neat. I wonder if that’s permanent and a property of the material, or if there’s some coating on the screen which could eventually wear out?
3. Custom apps. Despite Apple’s restrictions, there are a number of neat (and free) applications that can be downloaded which make the iPhone worth owning. Because AT&T requires a $30/month “unlimited” data plan, I can’t really afford to add texting to my phone. No problem — I just install Textfree Lite at no cost, and I can send up to 15 texts a day (that’s 450 a month — more than twice what you’d get with a $5/month texting plan) to anyone’s phone at no charge. If I wanted to send more, I could download Textfree Unlimited for a few dollars and there’s no monthly charge. Also, if I didn’t want to spend any money at all and didn’t mind loss of a couple features like push notification and a nice interface, I could simply use email or AIM to send SMS to someone’s phone.
I’m still hunting for the best task management and financial management applications so I can use my iPhone to help with that area, but I’m sure there is something great out there, and if not — I could always write my own.
4. Voice recognition. Although this is kind of neat in theory, I find that it can almost never recognize what I’m saying when I tell it to play a song, and will play the wrong song if it can even find a match. It also only dials correctly about 70% of the time, and I don’t know until it’s too late that it called the wrong person.
5. Battery. The battery life seems to be pretty good (even with me playing around on the iPhone all day with the LCD all the way up!) as long as I’m not connected to the 3G network most of the time. Although AT&T claims 3G is the fastest way to connect, I ran a speed test, and it is actually a little bit slower than WiFi at my house, which is pretty slow because we have a poor DSL connection. As such, I try to stay on WiFi whenever I can (hell — I’m afraid of exceeding the 5 gig transfer limit each month. I already used 1 gig of transfer in my first two days! Who knew you could use more than unlimited data?), which sort of sucks because I’m paying so much for that mandatory data plan.
Overall, although I was disappointed by the camera, voice recognition, and the artificial restrictions placed on the phone by Apple and AT&T, I still feel that (even crippled) the iPhone trumps the competition, for me anyway, and was a valuable purchase. I feel that because of all the apps (which, even though the Palm Pre will also have, I needed a new phone immediately, and the Pre will take a while before its app store catches up — if it does), the iPhone is a great choice for productivity. Even the built-in features, such as the compass, have a specific esoteric appeal to me (I can use it to determine which way is east when I need to meditate in an unfamiliar spot). The iPhone may not be right for everyone, but I think too many people are way too hard on its shortcomings while ignoring those of comparable devices.
The additional $100 for the improved hardware and increased storage capacity in the 3G S is easily justifiable (and negligible) in terms of the ~$2,000 spent over the course of a 24 month contract. It’s only an additional $4.17 a month for a better (albeit still crippled) camera, much more room for music/video/voice notes/etc, much faster hardware, and an overall sleeker device.
I hope to split a developer’s license with a friend soon so as to (hopefully) write applications that truly harness the full power of this device in context of my studies and lifestyle.
