Welcome to the funorama review of the iPhone 3GS, truth be told for anyone whose using iPhone before, there’s not much to say about this new model. Pretty much all of the upgrades have happened under the hood including a bombing processor and memory. Apple claims that everything is up to two times faster on the 3GS and we don’t dispute that claim. It definitely runs snappier, experience less hang ups than before and overall the experience was much better.
However that really means the phone hasn’t changed too much and that’s what we faulted for most. A few new applications have made their debut, we have voice memos which looks fancy but its really just a memo recorder. There’s our compass, again a cool looking app, very functional, however we cant think of a function to use it for. It is kind of nice because in Google maps as we move around, the map orientates itself. Still nothing could go out and buy a new phone over, if we flick the home screen to the left, we see spotlights search come up. Here we can search for most things on our phone, if we want to find contacts for instance we can find that and associate it with calendar events. You can also search the subject line of emails, we can find music and other things.
Very similar to the universal search we saw in the Palm Treo a few weeks ago, the only difference is that if its not found on the device there is no option to go search the web like we did on the Treo. For that we much prefer the pre implementation, beyond that there’s really not a whole lot more to say about the phone. The design is nearly identical to the one before, Apple claims its more finger print resistant. However we still manage to smudge it up pretty easily. It might be a touch easier to clean but there’s not much of a difference that we noticed. One of the big advantages that the 3GS is that we should see some improved gaming.
We’ll put up a flight simulator here, you can see that was just the intro video, we’ll run through a quick mission at least to show you how it looks. It had an improved 3G rendering, it does respond pretty well and we expect to see much better games to come out for the phone. That might be the most compelling reason to upgrade to the 3GS but to be honest. We would recommend that users of the 3G stick with what they have and simply upgrade to the 3.0 software. Pretty much everything available with the new software can be used on the 2G even as well as the 3G. One of the other things that cannot be used is the new voice control.
You simply press and hold the button and it will pop up, it then listens to us. We can tell it who we want to call either by name or number and we can do a few music functions like go to the next track, play an album and the phone can tell us what’s playing. Nothing too ground breaking and nothing we haven’t seen on an entry level hand sets in the past. The battery life has improved, five hours of talk time over the 3G and nine hours of Wi-Fi browsing. Memory has also increased up to eight and 16 to 16 and 32, however the eight gigabyte 3G will still be available on a new $99.00 price point.
If you’re a new iPhone user, no doubt go out and buy the 3GS, if you already have the 3G even if you qualify for the full upgrade, we’d recommend to sticking with what you have unless you absolutely do need voice control or you’re a hardcore gamer and are looking for the improved graphics. Beyond that there really isn’t just much compelling about the new phone, we think Apples definitely in rut, we really would have liked to see some of the rumors such as an LOD screen and a matt finish come to fruition. Unfortunately its just more the same and honestly we’re getting a little bored with it.
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