iPhone Review

There are simple reasons why the new iPhone 3G is better than the last.

The iPhone 3G is the beginning of a new computing platform. With 3G and the App Store, the iPhone is now one of the best handheld computers. Over the past years, Apple has made a subtle shift from developing products to building platforms. We witnessed the shift in the last update to the Apple TV, and the iPod touch. Now the 3G iphone hits two of the older model's critical weaknesses—poor phone call quality and slow Internet connection speeds—while not a huge physical upgrade over the original iPhone.

The most important changes is the 3G hardware & applications. The iPhone 3G uses HSDPA 3.6, AT&T's fastest download network. The 3G iphone gets an Internet connection speed upto 800Kbps in some cities. If you don't want to use HSDPA (or you live in a city like Midland, Texas, where it isn't available), the iPhone 3G also has 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi with a built in VPN client.

Another improvement is the vastly improved call quality of the iPhone 3G. Although the 3G call quality is often better than regular GSM, Apple had made a huge improvement on both sides. Doing side-by-side calls, the difference of the new iPhone and the old version is like the difference between talking to someone with their hand over their mouth and with their hand taken away. We noticed that the new iPhone's speaker and mic definitely improve sound quality, and when the 3G iPhone is running on a 3G network, calls sound especially clear compared to the old iPhone.

A new device is the built-in GPS, which worked surprisingly well. Right now GPS seems to exist mostly for geotagging your photos, social networking programs, and a bunch of apps that find restaurants or other businesses nearby. It got a fix quickly outdoors, and a little flashing blue dot in the Maps app even followed you walking through some cities. If the 3G iPhone can't get a GPS fix, it drops back to Wi-Fi triangulation, which uses nearby hotspots to figure out where you are within a few blocks. That works in dense urban areas, coincidentally where GPS is least likely to work.

Some other new improvements:

• Easily-replaceable battery -- especially being that 3G is much more demanding on battery power than EDGE data.
• The camera of the iPhone 3G will also now ask you permission to use GPS to geotag photos with your current location.
• The iPhone can now read PowerPoint, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote documents. It's still incapable of editing or creating new documents, however, and outside of sending yourself these files via email, there's no accessible file storage.
• Images on the web now can be saved to your camera roll by tapping and holding.
• Entering passwords is a little easier -- the last character you entered is temporarily shown at the end of the string. Keeps things safe but makes sure you know if you mistyped.