The release of the iPhone OS 3.0 update in the same week in June that Apple launched the iPhone 3GS created a lot of buzz in the tech media, not to mention mainstream media that cover tech closely. Living and breathing Apple tech as we do, it was a big week, but once the lines at Apple Stores died down, and iPhone OS 3.0 and iPhone 3GS were no longer the most popular Twitter and Digg topics, we wondered if average iPhone users even noticed that their smartphone’s OS had changed. We’re here to tell you that, yes, 3.0 brought changes--most of them positive, some of them puzzling, and others, like multimedia messaging, promising. (Although thanks to AT&T, the feature wasn’t even available for us to test at press time.)
As far as the new iPhone goes, it is the best iPhone yet--and when you factor in the OS 3.0 update, there’s not a single smartphone that can beat it. We conclude our guided tour of OS 3.0 with a review of the 3GS, complete with the scoop on how fast it really is compared to the 3G and the unvarnished truth about whether you really need to upgrade.
Even if you can’t afford it, aren’t yet eligible to upgrade, or simply refuse on principle to buy a new iPhone a mere year after the 3G came out, updating your iPhone OS to 3.0 shouldn’t be a choice--it’s a requirement. All iPhone owners will enjoy the new features the OS update brings, with the one exception of original iPhone owners who want to use MMS (which stands for multimedia messaging service, see below), though at press time AT&T hadn’t rolled out that feature yet anyway. Here, we take you on a rollicking tour of the additions and improvements in iPhone OS 3.0, pointing out highlights--and ticking through our wish list for 3.1--along the way.
Yes, it's here--and it's pretty great--but we have a few key suggestions for how Apple could make it even better.
Since the iPhone’s launch two years ago, BlackBerry users have been gloating about the iPhone’s lack of this functionality. As much as we hated to, we secretly agreed that releasing two iPhone models without one of the most basic functions of the modern GUI seemed like a huge mistake. There were no doubt a few hurdles to jump over to get cut, copy, and paste implemented on a touchscreen device, but we were confident that Apple would eventually give us CC&P, which it finally did in iPhone OS 3.0.
Context-sensitive pop-up menus offer controls for 3.0's new copy and paste functions.
If you haven’t seen it in action yet, the CC&P commands are fairly intuitive. Since they’re baked into the OS, they function similarly in third-party apps. Tapping and holding brings up CC&P controls when you release your finger. In Safari, you’ll end up highlighting a block of text, which you can adjust for accuracy as needed. In Mail and other text-specific apps, the same gesture will highlight a specific word, with movable handles on either side to adjust your selection. A context-sensitive balloon pops up, offering up tappable Copy, Cut, and Paste buttons as appropriate--the phone is smart enough to know that you can’t paste unless you’re in an editable text field. Thankfully, the iPhone’s clipboard maintains formatting when pasting, making it easy to copy part of a webpage into an email with formatting and links intact. The feature also works with images, and copying and pasting multiple images into an email ends up being much faster than adding them one by one the “old-fashioned” way. As a bonus, pasting a photo into an email lets you send a full-resolution copy (1200x1600 on the iPhone 3G, 1536x2048 on the 3GS), rather than the 600x800 version you get if you use the Email Photo option in the Photos app.
So, yes, overall CC&P is a win, but what’s the problem? The way the feature works in some apps is extremely annoying and requires way more taps than it should. Possibly the most common-use case for CC&P is looking up contact information and pasting it into an email. But in Contacts, you cannot simply find a contact and tap-and-hold to select their phone number or email address. Touching either of those will instantly initiate a phone call or create a new email message to that person. So instead of quickly grabbing someone’s contact info, you have to tap Edit, then tap a telephone number or email address, then finally tap and hold in the edit field, just to copy the information. Grabbing a simple email address requires several extra taps, and it puts you into editing mode, making it that much easier to accidentally bork your contact’s information. Trying to copy event info from Calendar also requires entering edit mode--an unnecessary pain when you’re trying to quickly move bits of data from between apps.
Copying and pasting a picture into an email allows you to send it at full resolution.
A better, and far more elegant, solution would have been to use a small icon to the left of contact info, for example, to instantly invoke CC&P controls, similar to the blue arrows in your Recents list that take you to a particular caller’s details. And if Apple didn’t want to clutter up the interface, the OS could be tweaked a bit to differentiate better between a tap and a tap-and-hold. We were also annoyed that in Messages, you can’t select a portion of a text message for copying, it’s all or nothing (and at press time, AT&T still hadn’t activated MMS, so we don’t know how that will come into play with messages that contain media and text content).
It's still got a ways to go before it's as powerful as Spotlight on your Mac, but the new device-wide search added to iPhone OS 3.0 makes quick work of locating email, contact info, calendar appointments, apps, and more.
We never thought we’d say this, but now that Spotlight search is part of the iPhone OS, we actually prefer checking email on our iPhone to checking it on our Mac. Not that Spotlight’s usefulness ends with Mail, of course. By sliding left from your first home screen, or tapping the tiny magnifying glass icon to the far left of the dots at the bottom of any home screen, you bring up the Spotlight window. Typing a term into the field sends your iPhone scouring all its contents for instances of that word--in Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Notes, your iPod library, and, of course, Apps. (For more on enhanced search and other features in iPod mode, see “King of the iPods,” below.)
Can't find an email by scrolling? Use Mail's Search function instead.
To access items shown in the search results--read an email, launch an app, or play an audio or video track--just tap it. For people with enough apps on their iPhones to fill up nine or more home screens with icons, Spotlight is a way faster way to find an app that’s on your eleventh home screen. So instead of swiping 11 times then tapping an app’s icon, just launch Spotlight, type in the first couple letters of the app’s name, and there you are. You just saved yourself 3 seconds! If you really want to shave seconds off searches--and especially if your large fingers have a hard time tapping the teeny-tiny magnifying glass on the home screen, or swiping left through screen after screen makes you dizzy--you can set the phone so double-clicking the Home button opens Spotlight: Choose Settings > General > Home > Search.
If you don't find the email you're looking for among downloaded messages, tap Continue Search On Server.
Back to Mail for a moment, there’s also a separate search feature within Mail that lets you refine your results by narrowing which part of the email it searches: sender, recipient, subject line, or the entire message. You also get the option to search messages that are still on your email server. Of course, if you want to search across more than one email account at once, the solution is to use Spotlight. Any results that are found in emails will appear in a list next to the Mail icon. When you tap the result, you’ll see which account it belongs to by tapping the left-facing arrow to go back to the inbox. It’s too bad the results list can’t display this detail for you, but we can also imagine how cluttered it could make the list.
Finding apps, emails, and notes with the same keyword or letter combo is so cinchy now. Thanks, Spotlight!
Find My iPhone is an awesome feature, but we think it's slimy of Apple to require a MobileMe subscription for it to work.
There really is no such thing as a free lunch. While Apple added Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe features to OS 3.0, it requires a MobileMe subscription ($99 a year, www.me.com) to use. So if you’re a cheapskate like some of us at Mac|Life--we answered with a decisive, “No thanks,” when asked by the friendly Apple salesperson if we wanted to purchase AppleCare for our iPhone 3GS, only to grit our teeth and open our wallets a few days later to shell out $99 for MobileMe--you’ll be peeved to learn that Find My iPhone is going to cost you.
Still, the ability to remotely locate and control your phone--and even wipe the data on it if need be--is probably worth the 100 bucks, especially since, despite MobileMe’s limitations, it’s still a handy service.
Make sure you mean it when you choose to wipe your iPhone. You can restore your data afterward, but it takes a while to really wipe it clean.
Activating Find My iPhone is easy. On your iPhone tap Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and tap the slider next to “Push” to “On.” Then head to your Mac and open a Web browser. Log in to your MobileMe account and click the Settings icon. It will probably ask you to re-enter your password, and once you do, your account settings will appear. In the bottom-left of the left-hand pane, Find My iPhone appears as an option. After you click the button to locate the phone, you’ll see a map with the phone’s location on it.
To display a message on the screen, and/or make it play a sound (even if the ringer is turned off), click Display A Message. If you also want it to play an alert sound--a not unpleasant echoing ding--check “Play a sound for 2 minutes with this message.” After you click Send, the phone does its thing. But if you’re hard of hearing, be warned: The alert sound is not very loud, and even though it overrides the silent mode switch, it only plays at the ringer volume the phone was set to before you turned off the ringer. So if you normally keep the volume on the low side, it might be hard to hear the phone if it’s in another room or even--as in our tests--in a metal file drawer inches away from where we sit.
Once you tell MobileMe that you want to wipe your phone, it becomes impossible to locate or use.
If it turns out that your phone has in fact been stolen or lost, Remote Wipe can erase the phone’s contents--including apps, contact data, email account settings, all of it--to prevent whoever has it from accessing your info. If the phone is just missing temporarily, you can restore the data on it from your last backup. Initiating Remote Wipe negates Find My iPhone’s ability to locate the phone, however, so be sure to locate the phone before you wipe it.
Reason #87 it's important to back up your iPhone regularly.
If you physically find your phone after it’s been wiped, you can restore its contents. Wait for the Remote Wipe to complete--it took a couple hours to wipe our 8GB iPhone 3G. During the wipe, you’ll see an Apple logo on the iPhone’s screen, and if you’re in MobileMe, a message saying “Location Not Available: Find My iPhone has been disabled because a wipe request is pending.” After the wipe is complete, you’ll need to restore your data from a recent backup in iTunes: Connect your phone to your Mac. You’ll see a box asking you to set up a new phone or restore a previously synced phone. Choose the latter and click OK.
We can't help you if you're stuck in the boonies with no Wi-Fi or 3G service, but when you've got your cellular Internet workin', Safari snaps to your taps just a little faster than before.
The big news for Safari is speed. Even if you haven’t stepped up to an iPhone 3GS--a lot of 3G users still aren’t eligible for upgrades, and given the economy, we can see why even if you were eligible, you’d hesitate--the version of mobile Safari that comes as part of iPhone OS 3.0 is considerably faster than its predecessor. When we tested Apple’s speed claims with an iPod touch before and after updating to 3.0, we got results of 2 to 16 times faster, depending on the specific test we were running. Overall, our results came back 3.36 times faster completing the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark tests (www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html), which is right in line with the Safari speed bump Apple touted.
Safari's new Autofill feature can keep track of your website log-ins.
Not all the improvements took place under the hood. Apple also added some key features that make mobile Safari easier to use. Autofill is the big one. Instead of retyping log-in information into Web forms, your iPhone running OS 3.0 can now remember log-in credentials for you. The feature is disabled by default--probably a good idea, given the potential for disaster with a lost iPhone that can automatically log in to your bank, Amazon, or eBay accounts. To turn it on, tap Settings > Safari. Here you can also specify a contact to be used to autofill your name, email address, and other personal info where appropriate. Using Autofill is an all-or-nothing proposition: Your iPhone will either remember every log-in and password, or it will remember none. And unfortunately, there’s no way to selectively delete saved info--although you can clear everything with a single tap if need be. While an iPhone thief taking control of your MacLife.com user account might not be a big deal, you might feel differently when they start using your Twitter account, or making “adjustments” to your 401(k) allocations. If you do decide to use Autofill, you should definitely enable the passcode lock on your phone.
Safari’s got a couple of new tricks up its sleeve when it comes to dealing with links too. Tapping and holding on a link now brings up a new pane offering buttons to Open, Open In New Page, and Copy. Open In New Page is handy if you’re working from search results, or if you want to open a link, but aren’t quite finished with the referring page. Taking advantage of the new CC&P goodness, you can also easily grab a URL for pasting into an email, IM, or text message to share with a friend.
Now you can open links in new pages or copy them to use elsewhere.
Safari’s also good to go with the next wave of Web development. Apple built this version to be compatible with HTML 5, an ongoing revision of the programming language that underlies the Web. There’s support for HTTP streaming audio and video, making it easier than ever to take advantage of media-rich websites from your iPhone (and which also might explain why Apple has been dragging its feet when it comes to support for Flash). Your iPhone can now pick a stream based on your current connection speed, whether you’re connected via Wi-Fi, 3G, or the pokey EDGE--resulting in smoother video and more reliable playback. And since it transmits via a standard HTTP connection, like the rest of the Internet, streaming media can easily pass through network firewalls, which is good news for slackers employed by companies with strict policies toward time-wasting websites like YouTube.
iPhone OS 3.0 adds more bells and whistles to Apple's most full-featured music player.
Apple didn’t forget that its flashy smartphone is an iPod too. And iPhone OS 3.0 makes it easier to navigate content you already own--as well as to easily buy more, of course, as Steve Jobs intended.
As we’ve said, Spotlight lets you search for and play songs and videos without even launching the iPod app. This works well, but Spotlight’s search results don’t include the names of playlists. And if you type the name of an album, you get a list of the album’s tracks in random order. Luckily, the enhanced search function within the iPod application offers finer control. You can search for playlists, and if you search for an album title, you’ll see the entire album up top, followed by an alphabetical list of its tracks.
The iTunes Store lets you redeem iTunes gift cards right from the phone.
Once a track is playing, skipping to the exact part you want is a snap, thanks to the new scrubber bar. To use it, hold your finger down on the playhead that appears on the song’s progress bar. While you’re holding the playhead, the words “High-Speed Scrubbing” appear above the progress bar, and you can slide your finger left or right to scrub through the track quickly. For slower scrubbing, slide your finger down the screen and watch the words change to Half-Speed Scrubbing, Quarter-Speed Scrubbing, and Fine Scrubbing, which is second-by-second control. Once you see the option you want, slide your finger left or right to scrub through the track. This is awesome for podcasts and audiobooks, but works on any selection, audio or video.
You can buy or rent movies from your iPhone, but the selection is much smaller than what's offered on your Mac.
The Now Playing screen has extra buttons when you’re listening to a podcast or audiobook. Tap the button on the right to set the playback speed to 2X (which is technically closer to 1.5X, but doesn’t change the pitch or make the people speaking sound like Chipmunks), slower 1/2X, or real-time 1X. The super-handy center button jumps back 30 seconds--we call it the “Say What?!” button. And over to the left is a button to email a link to the podcast to a friend, but the button only appears when you’re listening to a podcast, not an audiobook.
New parental controls let you limit what kinds of content can be brought and viewed.
OS 3.0 finally enables Stereo Bluetooth (aka A2DP), letting you pair a set of Bluetooth headphones to the phone and listen to your music in stereo, without wires. We tested this with Wi-Gear’s iMuffs MB220 and enjoyed clear stereo sound without needing the iMuffs’ included dongle. Stereo Bluetooth isn’t supported on the first-gen iPhone or the first-gen iPod touch, which is lame.
The iPod app's search function will find playlists, but the iPhone's Spotlight search won't.
Oh, and now you can shake your iPhone to turn on Shuffle, but it requires quite a violent and sustained shake on an iPhone 3G, rendering the feature more gimmicky than useful. The iPhone 3GS, on the other hand (see our review below), is highly susceptible to very slight movement, to the point where being jostled on the subway by another passenger while holding your phone could shuffle the playlist you’re listening to.
Three new buttons for podcasts: Email the podcast's link, jump back 30 seconds, and change the playback speed.
The iTunes Store app no longer needs Wi-Fi--you can browse using a 3G or EDGE connection and download purchases of less than 10MB (think songs, not videos). The store now includes movies to buy or rent, plus TV shows to buy, although with a much smaller selection than what’s available on your Mac. You can grab college lectures from iTunes U too (see “What I Learned at iTunes U”). Additional parental-control options found in Settings > General > Restrictions let parents limit what kind of content kids can buy or view on the phone.
Far more shows are available in the main iTunes Store on your Mac than in the smaller iTunes Store on your iPhone.
What’s still missing? We’d love it if our podcasts auto-updated on the phone the same way they do in iTunes on our Mac. We want the option to delete music and videos right from the phone, in case we want to rent a movie on the go and need to free up a little space. Taking the podcast-recommendation function a step further, how about the ability to email playlists? And in the iTunes Store, a Save For Later button would rock, for tagging interesting-looking content without purchasing it right away.
As (mostly) easy as 3.0 makes it to capture and share voice memos and sync notes, you really don't have an excuse for forgetting to pick up that gallon of milk.
If you don’t mind the sound of your own voice, OS 3.0’s Voice Memos feature is a welcome substitute for calling your home or work voicemail to leave yourself verbal reminders.
The audio quality is actually quite good--possibly even good enough to record audio for a podcast, though you’d surely want to invest in an external microphone. But for personal use--and recording fun stuff, like, for example, your toddler definitively declaring that Daddy is indeed her favorite parent, Voice Memos get our enthusiastic approval. Your voice memos are saved as M4A (Apple Lossless) files, which can be played back in iTunes, QuickTime, of course, and Windows Media Player, which comes in handy when you want to share audio recordings with Windows users. Sharing is a simple matter of tapping the Voice Memos list icon, selecting the memo you want to hear or share, then tapping Share. This opens an email window and attaches the file so your recipients can listen to it at their leisure.
You can use the built-in mic or your earphones' inline mic to record memos, just don't use the built-in mic when the iPhone is docked, since the 30-pin connector blocks it and your voice won't register.
The ability to send voice memos via email highlights a feature we wish Apple would add, however--the ability to do the same thing with voicemail messages. That way, busy people could take even fuller advantage of apps like QTech’s reQall (free in the App Store), which integrates info from email, IM, and text messages in a single command center for helping you stay organized and on top of personal and professional deadlines and to-dos.
Email a voice memo instantly by tapping Share from the List view.
Turning to a slightly lower-tech form of keeping track of things, the ability to sync the iPhone’s Notes app with Apple Mail is new--and we certainly like being able to access notes from our iPhone on our Mac, as well as create new notes on our Mac using its full-size keyboard (in Mail, on the left-hand pane under Reminders, select Notes). To make sure Notes syncing is set up in iTunes, connect your iPhone to your Mac, select the phone under Devices, and on the Info tab, scroll down to Notes and check “Sync notes.”
Though it's not as straightforward as it should be, you can now sync notes you create on your Mac in Mail to your iPhone.
Now here’s where the typical Apple ease- of-use flies out the window. You’d think that by checking “Sync notes,” this would indicate that you want the info synchronized in both places--your Mac and your iPhone. In a bizarre twist, however, you have to take an additional step to transfer any notes you create in Mail on your Mac to your iPhone. With the phone connected, in iTunes, select the phone under Devices. On the Info tab, scroll down to Advanced. Under “Replace information in this iPhone,” check Notes. Notice the fine print underneath, however, which informs you that this preference will apply to the next sync only. WTF? This left us scratching our heads...and sending out a little prayer to the iPhone update gods that Apple will see the error of its ways and repent with a less kludgy process for syncing notes created on your Mac to your iPhone with the next iPhone software update.
Multimedia messaging wasn't available at press time, but we're looking forward to testing it once AT&T gets its act together.
At the June 2009 WWDC keynote address announcing 3.0’s imminent release, nothing was more groan-inducing than the announcement that AT&T wasn’t ready to roll out long-overdue MMS messaging to iPhone users. Try as he might, Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iPhone software, simply couldn’t put a positive spin on AT&T dropping the ball when it came to MMS, and the crowd at Moscone West certainly let their displeasure be known. And really--can you blame them? Either AT&T consists of the only people in the known universe who didn’t know 3.0 was launching in June, or they never read anything on the Internet and were just unaware that we’ve been waiting for MMS since--well, since June 29, 2007, the day the original iPhone launched.
MMS allows users to send photos, audio, and video content to mobile phones, similar to the way that text messages (SMS, or simple messaging service) work. AT&T has supported MMS on its other handsets for years now, and given that the iPhone is kind of a big deal, we’ve always been at a loss trying to come up with the reasons AT&T is shutting out iPhone users. Sure, AT&T attempted to make up for the lack of native support for MMS with that “View my message” site (score one for unintuitive, hard-to-remember URLs), but you couldn’t save content through that website, and thanks to incomprehensible message URLs and AT&T’s passwords that used both the number one and the lowercase letter L’s, as well as lowercase O’s and zeros--which aren’t exactly easy to tell apart--most iPhone users just ignored MMS messages because of the difficulties accessing the content via the Web.
AT&T claimed that delayed MMS rollout had to do not with the network itself, but with needing to remove an “MMS opt-out” block on everyone’s accounts, which automatically got placed on iPhone accounts when the phones were activated (“MMS Opt Out” was even listed on your AT&T bill, as if it were a feature). We can only guess at what sort of convoluted account management software AT&T is using, but whatever it is, modifying everybody’s accounts took a while. At press time, MMS hadn’t launched, but by the time you read this, hopefully AT&T’s “late summer” launch date will have come and gone, although first-gen iPhone owners who haven’t upgraded to at least a 3G model are still out of luck.
Aside from amusing photos of cats, babies, and other family members, MMS on the iPhone promises to let you send audio, contacts, and locations as MMS messages. Noticeably absent for iPhone 3GS owners, however, was support for sending video clips via MMS. The ability to quickly zap contact info to a friend or colleague reminds us of the old Beam feature on Palm Pilots, partially negating some of our complaints about the difficulty of using copy-and-paste in Contacts. And we love the idea of being able to quickly send location information to another user, handy at outdoor festivals, sporting events, college campuses, or anywhere you need to quickly gather your crew. Gone are the days of trying to yell driving directions to a friend over the din of a good party--now you’ll be able to use your iPhone to quickly fire off your location via an MMS message.
Here's why 3.0's phat SDK matters to consumers.
iPhone OS 3.0 comes with tons of new tools for developers. What does that mean for us humble consumers? More sophisticated behavior from your iPhone or iPod touch, that’s what.
Push notifications allow developers to send alerts to your device even if the apps in question aren’t running. AIM, an early example, can notify you of new IMs with a sound, a pop-up message, and a number badge on the AIM icon--or any combination of those. Better yet, users can configure these notifications on an app-by-app basis in Settings > Notifications. Using push notifications does drain your battery faster than leaving them turned off, however.
In-app purchasing is a new revenue model that allows developers to offer a basic paid app and then sell additional add-on content to users from right inside the application. For example, Freeverse’s popular Flick Fishing lets users pay for a new fish, an extra fishing spot, and multiplayer mode. Pangea’s Enigmo 3.0 offers two level packs aimed at kids for 99 cents each. Developers aren’t allowed to sell add-on content for a free application, though, so don’t worry about falling in love with a free app only to be nickle-and-dimed later on.
Developers can even write iPhone apps that control a separate accessory connected to the iPhone’s dock port or paired with the phone via Bluetooth. At press time, no accessories had yet hit the market, but both iPhone 3.0 preview events (in Cupertino this past March, and again at WWDC in June) showed glimpses of some of the cool things we can expect.
LifeScan demoed an app that logs data from a connected glucose meter and includes tools to help diabetics track and manage their disease. Line 6’s MIDI Mobilizer app will let guitarists control their attached Variax guitar, switching between instrument models, amplifier profiles, and effects on the phone to radically change the sound of the connected, physical guitar.
Peer-to-peer connectivity allows developers to write apps so that multiple iPhones can interact with each other over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. It’s seamless for the user--automatic discovery, no pairing required. This will allow us to play multiplayer games without the benefit of a Wi-Fi hotspot. Smule’s Leaf Trombone: World Stage uses peer-to-peer to facilitate trombone duets, for example, and Flight Control includes a cooperative two-player mode. First-gen iPhones and iPod touches can use peer-to-peer apps over Wi-Fi, but not Bluetooth.
Developers can use a lot of iPhone 3.0’s other bells and whistles in their applications too, including the landscape keyboard, the cut-and-paste function, and the same Google maps already found in Apple’s native Maps application. Apps written for iPhone 3.0 can access the iPod app’s music library, so users can enjoy (and control) their own music while using a third-party app. Apps can even use the proximity sensor--an early example of this is reminder app reQall (more on this app in “iPhone, Take a Memo,” above), which automatically starts recording your voice memo when you hold the iPhone to your ear.
All in all, Apple added more than 1,000 new APIs (application programming interfaces) to the iPhone 3.0 SDK, giving third-party developers access to the same tools Apple’s own programmers use to build the company’s native iPhone apps. What sorts of magic the developers will come up with remains to be seen, but if the early examples are any indication, we’re in for a wild ride.
Some early examples of iPhone 3.0 features in third-party apps--watch the App Store for more.
PUSH NOTIFICATIONS
You have to authorize push notifications for each app individually, if that app supports them.
Leaf Trombone: World Stage pushes these notifications to recruit you for judging.
Customize push notification settings for each app in Settings > Notifications.
PEER-TO-PEER CONNECTIVITY
Peer-to-peer connectivity in Leaf Trombone: World Stage lets you play duets with a friend.
IN-APP PURCHASES
Flick Fishing uses in-app purchasing to sell you new content.
It's more evolution than revolution, but it's the best iPhone yet.
In 10 years, we’ll all sit around our 50-inch Apple TV entertainment/computing center and remember the good old days, when we stood in line every summer to buy the latest and greatest iPhone. While the Apple robot upgrades our iPhone 9GSSV with the new welding feature (welding will be huge in the future--just you wait), we’ll remember the exact moment when the iPhone went from being a smartphone to a computer with a phone feature. That moment was this June 19, 2009, when the iPhone 3GS made its way into our lives.
Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS emphasizing that the S stood for Speed. A marketing ploy? Sure. But, unlike that hatchback you bought in the ’90s with the S badge, this S actually delivers.
Go, Speed iPhone, go!
As soon as you start launching applications, you’ll notice the difference between the iPhone 3GS and its predecessor, the iPhone 3G. Games that had slight stutters on the 3G now blaze along with nary a hiccup. One of the biggest complaints about the iPhone’s camera--that it took forever to launch and by the time it was ready to snap a shot, Bigfoot was already on his way to terrorize another group of campers--is gone. (For proof, check out these speed test results below.)
The Need for Speed
Real-world usage should be your first consideration if you’re thinking of upgrading to the 3GS. Combined with iPhone 3.0 OS and its landscape keyboard option, the 3GS will help you shed that netbook envy you may have been experiencing over the past year. Gone is the typing latency that would occasionally plague the first two iPhones. And zippier Safari loads mean you’ll spend less time reaching for your MacBook and more time on the couch looking up random Simpsons trivia. It’s this speed that gives the iPhone 3GS the ability to make all the other features possible.
(click to enlarge)
You Ought to be in Pictures. The Camera app delivers higher-resolution images thanks to the 3GS’s 3-megapixel camera. The 2-megapixel camera in the previous iPhones was serviceable, but nothing to cheer about. If the lighting was right and your subjects stood still, you could get some nice shots. The new camera--while still not the best camera phone out there--is a huge improvement, and you can tell in side-by-side images taken by the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. Partly responsible for the improved quality is the new Camera app, which auto-focuses, auto-exposes, and auto-white-balances with the tap of a finger. We tested the camera in different lighting settings. We still experienced a slight blueing of images during especially bright days. Auto-focus brought a depth to our photos that we weren’t able to produce with the iPhone 3G. The added macro focus means we’ll finally be able to take decent photos of our GI Joe collection.
The 3GS offers in-phone video "editing" via the Trim feature, but once a frame is trimmed, it's gone for good. We hear Apple may fix this in OS 3.1.
For the filmmakers out there, the updated Camera app also shoots video and allows you to trim the video and upload it to YouTube or your MobileMe account or send via email. The video quality doesn’t measure up to the quality of the Flip Mino and is a little soft in comparison with other portable video cameras on the market, but it can do what those can’t: trim and upload directly to YouTube or email while on the go. Sadly, trimming video is a destructive affair. In other words, make sure you don’t want those last few seconds of video before you trim it. Because once it’s trimmed, it’s gone forever, unless you’ve synced with your computer or you’ve emailed yourself the file, which doesn’t work with videos that are too long anyway (the longest video clip we were able to email was 47 seconds). Once uploaded, you’re presented with the ability to view your “films” within iPhoto or share them with your friends and family. With today’s throngs of citizen journalists on the loose, this could be the feature that sells the iPhone 3GS.
Voice Your Concerns. While iPhone sour-grapes-eaters complained about its lack of voice control, those who have actually used voice dialing on other phones know that voice control is never without glitches. Often, after failed attempts telling a phone to “Call Aunt Ruth,” you give up and find her phone number in your contact list by hand. Apple brought voice control not only to the 3GS’s phone function, but also to iTunes (through the OS 3.0 update), with better results than we remember on old-school cell phones. But the feature is still far from perfect. We were impressed with Voice Control’s ability to recognize the difference between the names Michael and Micah, while we walked outside on a windy day using the included headset. We had less luck with song and artist selection, though, only successfully playing certain songs or artists using Voice Control about 70 percent of the time. That rate jumped to about 95 percent inside in a quiet room. While driving, though, the whole process becomes comical. Repeated requests for TV on the Radio yielded Radiohead, and, for some reason, asking for the Bellrays got us Suede. Phone calls were slightly better while driving, but the technology still requires some work for when you need it most--outside in noisy environs or in the car, especially now that many states require hands-free cell phone use.
The nice Voice Control robot tells you when you have multiple phone numbers for the same contact so you can reach them at the right number.
Hide and Seek. OK, so a compass isn’t what we were clamoring for when we thought about a new iPhone. A compass is what you give to your wacky mountain-man cousin or a kid who’s just joined the scouts; it’s not something you look for on a piece of electronics. The app itself does exactly what you would expect: It points north. You can choose between magnetic north and true north. If you don’t know the difference, you better hope your high school earth-sciences teacher has retired by now. The Compass app’s killer feature is when you tap the locate button in the lower-left corner. It opens the Maps app and displays your location. Tap the locate button a second time, and the map orients to show which direction you’re facing. As you turn, it turns. Suddenly the compass is the greatest thing ever for finding the best taqueria in town.
Oil Slick. No one wants to admit that they have greasy skin. The 3GS’s fingerprint-resistant oleophobic display helps displace the greasy fingerprints you’ve been leaving on your iPhone’s screen. It doesn’t completely eliminate fingerprints, of course, but it does a good job minimizing the finger- and faceprint goo as compared to the 3G. The 3GS’s screen does feel a tad bit more slick than those of previous iPhone models, but we quickly got used to it and enjoyed our less oily iPhone screens. The new screen coating means it’s easier to clean with a vigorous rub against the leg of your jeans too.
The bottom line. The newest iPhone is a must-have upgrade for owners of the first-gen iPhone and those new to the iPhone world. For iPhone 3G owners, its new features, while exciting, don’t feel substantial enough for anyone beyond the Apple fanatic (namely us and our readers) to upgrade. Just be sure to give us a heads up when you post that video on YouTube of you dancing to Thriller. --Roberto Baldwin
iPhone 3GS
COMPANY: Apple
CONTACT: www.apple.com
PRICE: 16GB, $199*, 32GB, $299* (*new AT&T customers and eligible current customers)
REQUIREMENTS: iTunes 8.2
FAST!!! Video shooting, editing, and uploading means you'll see more videos of stupid people doing stupid things. Hooray!
Longer battery life doesn't extend to 3G data/voice usage. New features may not be compelling enough to upgrade to 3G owners.
