The New iPhone 3GS – Better Than iPhone 3G?
In the blogging world, you are in the business of sharing your life, experiences and random thought probing antidotes with the world. Any device that can make the transition from real life to the web world is worth its weight in gold. The iPhone from Apple has allowed bloggers to reach their audiences in ways they never thought possible with instant feedback and content.
I already owned the previous generation iPhone 3G and while I can come up with about a thousand reasons to justify owning the new iPhone 3GS, there was one reason that sealed the deal in my house. My wife had been using my old Blackberry Curve with no data plan for awhile now and she was ready to get an iPhone. When the wife is on board…things get done! We went to the Apple store, used her upgrade and bought the new iPhone 3GS.
Now…remember when I said that tools like the iPhone are essential to blogging? Well, I swapped the sim cards and gave my better half the 3G while I took over the new 3GS. So how does this compare to the 3G and was it worth the upgrade?
So…with all of the published improvements on the iPhone 3GS vs. the 3G…how does it stack up?
Right off the bat, you can tell an instant difference in speed on the 3GS as compared to the 3G. The extra ram and processor speed go a long way in everyday use and this becomes painfully obvious with 3rd party apps. The load times are significantly faster and you can actually see the genie effect and other graphical elements that were choppy before.
As for the new 3G network…I am not sure yet. Until they implement it in full force in Atlanta, I will just have to take AT&T’s world that it will be faster.
The camera is much better than the previous model 3G and the focus function works exactly as advertised, and the camera app loads much faster. The shutter speed could still be a little bit faster and low light shots are still going to be difficult. The up close and personal shots (macro) are drastically improved and as you can see by the unedited pictures below…overall image quality is impressive for a camera phone.
Video – Let the production begin!
One of the biggest advertising points behind the iPhone 3GS is the ability to record and cut video. I had jailbroken my previous 3G to enable 15 fps video recording and it was mediocre at best. While the 30 fps out of the new 3GS is not mind blowing by any means…it is good enough to share with friends and use for the web. The clip below is of my Boxers walking around the backyard. As you can see by the stripe of missing grass…they tend to do laps that ruin any form of sustainable lawn life!
This shot was uploaded to Vimeo, but you can also directly upload to YouTube from your iPhone 3GS. Historically…YouTube’s compression is terrible and as you can see by that same footage, it is only good for sharing with a large network. In all reality…the Vimeo clip above does not look as good as it did uploading to Facebook.
I bought the iPhone 3GS for several reasons, but the most important features were the camera and video as a blogger needs to be able to share his or her life with the world quickly and easily. The overall speed of he iPhone 3GS is much faster than the previous version (3G), but I do not think that is going to come into play until a later date when 3rd party apps can really tie into that speed.