Three Gee Yes!

I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for one week now (yes, I did buy one on the first day they were available, but I didn’t wait in line for it – the AT&T store here in east-nowhere had plenty) and I’d like to share with you my impressions.

Now I’m not going to go on and on about the faster response due to the hardware, although that is impressive, or the fact that upgrading from a first generation iPhone to anything with 3G and GPS is awesome. Nor will I sing the praises of Copy and Paste, although the inclusion of them is of course the long-awaited cherry on the top of the iPhone Sundae.

No, better people than me have written about all these things.

What I want to talk about are some of the lesser publicized benefits of drinking the 3GS Kool-Aid.

Play It Again

On the Edge version of the iPhone (not sure how this worked on the 3G) if you were listening to music (or, more likely in my case, a podcast) and paused it, probably using the button on the earbuds, there was some period of time during with clicking the earbud button again would un-pause the audio.

I never figured out how long this was, but if you waited too long (definitely 10 or 15 minutes was too long) nothing would happen and you would have to dig the phone out of your pocket, unlock it, go back to the iPod application and hit the play icon to start it up.

With the 3GS, the play/pause functionality on the earbuds seems to have no timeout. This, to me, is the equivalent of your car stereo starting up at the same spot every time you turn on the car, versus resetting to some idle state if the car is off for more than fifteen minutes.

Jam and Edge

It was almost comical, a few months after the iPhone came out, everybody suddently became specifically aware of the noise that GSM signals caused when interfering with audio equipment. I remember sitting in the meeting room at work, with severn or eight people packing iPhones and the conference call speaker phone sputtering the whole time.

The worst part, though, was that I had to put my phone into Airplane Mode whenever hooking it up to the radio in my car. This is probably because the radio (and the car) is somewhat old and doesn’t have the shielding necessary to deal with today’s electronic interference. But still it was a pain.

With the 3GS (and I assume the 3G), this all went away. Sure, I still get some interference, but a) it happens so infrequently and has such short duration that it is easily ignorable and b) the 3G interference noise is so much less offensive than the Edge noise.

The Edge interference noise was usually louder than the volume coming out of the stereo and, at least in the areas I tend to drive through, was “on” more than it was “off”. It was so bad that driving the 3 minutes to my allergy shots from work, I couldn’t leave the phone’s GSM radio on because I wouldn’t be able to listen to anything without the interference killing it.

The 3G interference noise is much quieter, and on some level, it also just sounds like the data is being passed so much quicker, which is probably why it doesn’t last as long. It’s like listening to a 9600KBaud modem connection noise versus a 2400 Kbaud.

I’ve driven to and from work and all around town this week with the 3GS plugged into the car stereo, and the noise has been on the order of a few seconds per day, versus 30+ seconds for every minute on Edge.

And lest you think that I’m an anomaly, I don’t live in a major metropolitan area (proof: right down my street is a place that, until recently, had a sign outside that said “Taxidermist/Beauty Salon”) so my 3G coverage should not be any better than most places around the country.

I’m Ready For My Close-Up Mr. Damille

But the most surprising, and coolest, thing about the 3GS is the camera.

Of course this was a major weakness of the original (and 3G) iPhone. Even though it had 2.0 Megapixels (which, coincidentally, is the same as my decrepit point-and-shoot Canon camera) the tiny optics and lack of exposure and focus control made it only useful because it was the one camera you always had on you. My pictures were consistently blurry and lint-covered. Not to mention over/under-exposed.

The 3GS not only has a 3.0 Megapixel camera, with focus and exposure controls (to some degree) which actually work pretty well, but it adds video capability.

You all knew this already. But there is one feature of the video camera that deserves special mention.

How many of us have, when we first got hold of a digital camera that shot video, rotated the camera 90 degrees to capture something in portrait aspect ratio, only to find, upon importing it into the computer, that neither the camera nor the computer could compensate for that, and now you’re stuck with either fixing it in some high-end software like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, or watching what you recorded with your head tilted at a painful angle?

I mean, the cameras are smart enough to rotate still photos 90 degrees, but they don’t seem to understand how to do that with video.

Engineers at Apple must have run into this because they hooked the video camera into the tilt sensor of the phone, so that if you turn it, it still plays back right-side up. This is one of the many touches that make me think that Apple could dominate the camera market if they a) wanted to, and b) hired enough optics experts away from Canon and/or Nikon.

All Is Not Well

There are, however, a few missteps, as there always are, even with Apple.

First of all, the iPhone 3GS does not come with a dock to set it in while charging/syncing. I don’t know if the 3G came with one, but the Edge one did, and I used it daily. Apple charges $29 for one. Is anyone going to pay that much? I’m not.

The next one is probably a fluke, but the power adapter that came with my phone doesn’t work. I did the whole combinatorial testing suite (old adapter, new cable; new adapter, old cable; etc) and came to the undeniable conclusion that my power adapter does not charge.

So I called up the AT&T store, and using the imperfect choices on their menu, got shunted over to Apple’s support line. Apple’s tech support guy took fifteen minutes and a consultation with a “technical specialist” to tell me to go to the AT&T store for a replacement part.

You’re probably smart enought to predict that when I got to the AT&T store, they said I had to go to the Apple store, since AT&T doesn’t stock replacement parts. So now I need to trek over to the Apple store, which is much farther than the AT&T store, to get it replaced.

I haven’t heard any other reports of anyone’s adapter being DOA, so like I said, this is probably just a fluke.

My third complaint is about the shape. The rounded back of the 3GS (and 3G) is problematic. The Edge phone had a nice flat back that remained stable when you pushed the home button while it was on a tabletop.

Not so with the 3G varieties. I understand that they had to increase the thickness of the middle part of the phone due to increased hardware so the tapered the ends give the illusion of thinness, but I’d rather have a slightly thicker phone all the way down than try to type on a weeble-wobble.

My last complaint is perhaps not unique to the 3GS, but I haven’t tested it on any other platform. And it’s sort of one of those “problems you’d love to have” kind of things.

You see, my company operates a Wifi network. I’ve had my Edge iPhone connected to it for at least the past year. It’s nice because when I’m in part of the building where reception is good, bandwidth was noticeably better than Edge speeds.

Now that I have access to the 3G network (such that it is on AT&T), my throughput on 3G anywhere in the building is faster than the best throughput on the corporate Wifi. So, I told my phone to ignore that Wifi network. Done and done.

Or so I thought.

Every time I open up Mail, Safari, or any other net-enabled application, it asks me if I want to join the very network that I told it to ignore. What was the point of ignoring it?

If anyone knows how to stop the phone from asking me to join this network, please let me know. It’s kind of annoying.

Until then, I’ll keep hitting “Cancel” every time it comes up and enjoying my 3GS speed demon.