Apple iPhone 3G - Review

Apple iPhone 3G - Review Welcome to the phonearena.com video review for the iPhone 3G. The 3G is of course the successor to the original iPhone, one of the most popular phones ever. There's not a whole lot different with the design of this phone. Most notably, you notice the back casing is now colored and supposed to the previous metal. We have a black version but it also comes in white if you get the 16-gig. Other than that, everything is pretty much the same. It has the same screen size and screen technology. You have the little home button here down at the end. It still have the chrome trim around. One difference is the buttons although there are in the same place when I did the same thing. Because of the dark background, we now have silver metal buttons so we have the toggle switch here for the sound so it turns it to vibrate and off and we also have the volume rocker. Up top you simply have the lock button. We have a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack over here. It should be noted that this is not recessed like it was in the original one so it's pretty much any headphone should be working with this now. Not sure if you can really tell with the black on black but we do have the little simcard slot here. There is a small hole for the eject and it actually comes with the tune now instead of using paperclip. Down at the bottom we have the dock connector and as you can see on either side, there are stereo speakers. These along with the earpiece is covered in mesh as supposed to the old style were it was kind perforated plastic. But other than that, the design is pretty much the same. It is half a millimeter thicker than the original however the edges are more rounded so it has a little bit better in hand feel. The plastic background does not make it feel as cheap as we initially thought it would. It's definitely a different feel but it's not slippery at all. You can see I'm kind of pushing here and it's really not moving. So we don’t have any issues with it. As far the interface goes and it's not a whole new to report here. I still seem slide on that screen that we have. In honest with you we have bunch of apps on here that’s because of the app store. The app store is the big change with the new iPhone in addition to of course 3G and GPS but this will open the phone up to a lot of third party applications. There's already several hundred available and that list is only going to grow. So you can see here it's a very iTune like interface. You have the different applications. You got new one we thought here in the featured area. We have the top 25 where we got the top 25 free. The top 25 paid applications. There are broken down by categories so we can go and see let’s say what is in utilities and of course you could also search for it. So if you know the name with the application you’re looking for and then here is a little update tab. Right now, everything we have is up to date. Beyond that, there isn't a whole lot to show as far the interface goes. It’s still generally as smooth as ever. Everything is of course running fine now. We do have some problems with it every now and again though. A little bit of lag issues, obviously as we can get this on video of course everything is going to run absolutely perfectly like it should be and like we expect it to be and like we saw with the original iPhone. Here, we are in the pictures menu, of course if we rotate the picture, the screen will rotate, and again we can zoom, pinch, all that phone, finger friendly stuffs that we’re used to from the first time around. There are a lot of really neat apps that we’ve found so far. One of the ones we really like is the sport tap application here. As you can see were going to kind of pressing the screen a couple of times here. It's not as responsive as it used to be. It will work most of the time and then every once in a while like right there, it will mess up. So, here were in this application, were going to go to the home. What this is just an example of many of the free applications over there. This has pretty much any sport that you’d be instant following from baseball and football to Formula One, Indie Car, Arena Football League, majorly soccer, English premiere league, just one of the examples of some of the really cool stuffs that the developers are doing here. But the overall interface remains the same. You can see we’ve downloaded a number of things and our screen is getting cluttered. On of the things we wished the iPhone did, given at the app store is going to be creating a many more icons of your home screen is a have weight sort them in the folders. So in create a sport folder and put our sport stuffs and put our MLB.com and put our baseball application and our live sports application all in one sports folder so that it's not taking up 6 or 7 or 8 spots on our main screen. But hopefully again, there are some that will come in your software whether it will or not. We’ll have to see the best of beauty of the platforms that can be always be updated. Of course, the iPhone is first and foremost the multi-media phone. It's as they say the best iPod out there and nothing is really change. We still love it. It s still fantastic. We have the same old ipod interface, nice large cover art. We rotate it; we’ll get into the cover field mode. But what’s great—let’s go to back into there and we’ll take a look at a video here. Again, it rotates large full stream videos. They look great. It happens to —control up but I will play it fast forward or rewind, very, very simple. Everything works as you expect, again nothing has changed from the original but can't really tell it for that because they had it pretty perfect. Another thing that we really like is Mobile Safari and it's just as great as ever. As you can see, we got our iPhone 3G hands on loaded. One of the reasons is because if you see there is the YouTube video on this. If we actually click on it, it will load up the YouTube player and we can watch that were like going to since we’re — our own. But again, the iPhone 3G is just as good at multi-media and web browsing. It was the original iPhone but nothing new to speak off. All in all we’re a little bit disappointed with the iPhone 3G. We have some high expectations for it even how the original iPhone revolutionize the mobile world. There really isn't much changed with the 3G. Obviously, there's 3G data and there is the GPS and the new software but the new software is available on the old phone as well. And quite frankly, the new software is pretty buggy. We have an issues, were reading lots of reported issues and it's not up to Apples normal high quality software easy to us, just works standards. So that’s something that can always be fixed in future firmware upgrades or probably expecting to see something very soon from apple to address a lot of these issues but for now, we don’t really recommend an upgrade. If you’re new user go out and buy it. It's great and if you don’t have one and you’re planning in getting one but for resisting iPhone owners unless you absolutely need 3G and or GPS, stick with your own one and just upgrade the software.