Up Close and Personal with the iPhone 3GS #1 - The S Stands for Speed

Butterscotch Tutorial Special iPhone 3 GS New Features Overview Part one of five: "The S is for Speed" Sean Carruthers: Hi I'm Sean Carruthers and welcome to the first in the five part series on the new iPhone 3GS. Now the 3GS is the new hardware version of the iPhone, the previous version the iPhone 3G and then the iPhone 3GS, the S is supposed to stand for speed. Now you can't really see much difference on the two of these things with the quick look, they actually look fairly identical with a quick glance. So you can tell just flipping over to the other side again there's not a whole of difference here. This one has a white lettering for the iPhone, this one is shiny and it's a little bit harder to see under our lights here. This one maxed out at 8 and 16, this on goes to 16 and 32. Camera looks the same, the connectors on the bottom look the same. There's again very little hardware difference except for the fact that new one is a slight bit thinner and it's really hard to tell. It fits in most accessories, cases may be a little bit looser, thanks to the thin design on this. Now where you can really start to tell the difference between these two is when you start running applications. Now with the pervious generation when you press on an application it would take a little of time to fire up, even if it was just your calendar. Now the best way to show this off is by doing a head to head here. So I'm going to flip this into landscape mode here because we're going to fire up an application that goes into landscape and it's a game called Peggle from PopCap, a very fun game. I'm going to click both of them at the same time here and you'll the difference in speed between the two. So both launch, now the one on the left very much slower, this one is already ready to play, so you can press go, press adventure and we're already playing by the time this other one is still going. You get the idea, so this is ready to go and this other one took a lot longer to get even to the point where you were ready to be able to start the game. So again speed is a huge, huge concern with the old one and the new version, the 3GS has dealt with a lot of those issues. It isn't completely fixed, there's still times when you have to launch an application that takes a few seconds to go, it's just the nature of the beast, but this one actually does cut down on it quite substantially. One other thing you may notice quickly here is this one actually has a battery indicator on the top and in percentage, this one doesn't. The old one doesn't even allow it, even if you upgrade it to the 3.0 OS for the iPhone that you can do that, get all of the new software features, but not that one because it's slightly hardware based. Now when you fire that up for the first time, you won't necessarily see that battery percentage indicator. If you are looking for the battery indicator you can go over to settings, go into general and click on usage of all things and you'll see a battery percentage slider up the top here, so you can slide it off or you can slide it back on again. The other thing with the new generation of the iPhone is it has gotten something called A2DP. A2DP is Bluetooth and it's a new stereo profile that is being sued by accessories that use left and right channel. Now if you've tried streaming music from the old iPhone to one of these new devices you'll probably notice this is very tinny, it doesn't sound very good and it's usually monophonic, it only comes out of one ear. The newest generation over here actually supports stereo streaming and it sounds a whole lot better. So if you have one of those headsets that has two years, rather than just a standard old Bluetooth headset it actually will sound a whole lot better. There's a few other features that we're going to talk about in upcoming episodes of this, including voice control, new camera, the compass and some accessibility features, so stay tuned for additional episodes in this series. butterscotch; tasty tech, delicious downloads Butterscotch.com a division of Tucows Corp. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/