ECMASOFT - Publications
The iPhone 3G Review
And Apple did cope with it. A new updated iPhone 3G was released in a year. And it was a success. However, some drawbacks were still found.
iPhone Design
The iPhone had a great design and the main feature of it was a large touch-sensitive display. The display remained in the new version, so there was no need to develop anything new. The iPhone 3G design hasn't changed greatly.
The body of the iPhone 3G is made of high-quality plastic. Many will say that, comparing with the iPhone, it seems cheaper. But the plastic frame looks much more stylish.
However, the plastic body may be a problem for those who have the traditional black iPhone 3G: on the even black surface all the fingerprints are vividly seen in a couple of days. The 16mb white iPhone 3G is more expensive, but it hasn't such drawbacks.
3G - the main iPhone improvement.
The 3G support is the main improvement of the new iPhone by the iPhone development. The average speed of data transmission in the 2G networks has also increased. Now it ranges from 800 kb per second up to 1.1 mb per second (it also depends on the mobile operator).
Web-surfing became easier due to the increased speed. New Safari downloads much faster. The connection is as fast as it would be on a computer.
The sound of iPhone.
There were many complaints of the low quality of the sound in the previous iPhone. Apple was to improve it. The new iPhone 3G has a better sounding system. The quality of music and ringtones is amazing. It is better to use Bluetooth-headphones to reduce environmental noise.
iPhone GPS.
The new iPhone is the first Apple device with a GPS support. And the lack of experience in this sphere is obvious. GPS support will be useful mainly for those who like to take photos with iPhone built-in camera: iPhone 3G supports geo-targeting function. This function will be helpful for Google Maps users, it allows to define your location on-line. It takes only few seconds (for many other smartphones it would be a minute or so). But we can't call it a fully-featured navigator. The iPhone GPS system is not updated enough to use it while driving a car or searching the way.
The AppStore has many applications based on GPS technologies; some of them may be interesting for iPhone 3G users.
iPhone software.
The software importance should not be underestimated. The new service — AppStore — will be admired by iPhone 3G users. A great number of applications can be bought there. This is a distinctive feature of the iPhone 3G, not so many cellphones and smartphones have such option. Now there are thousands of iPhone applications ready to be downloaded in the AppStore. Some of them are free, and the price for the others is reasonably fair.
The drawback of the iPhone applications is that they can not be minimized and continue functioning.
Conclusions.
The new iPhone differs greatly from other touchphones. It has a very intuitive interface, fast web-surfing. We should admit that Apple has got rid of many drawbacks of the previous iPhone. And here's the result: the new iPhone 3G which is much better than its predecessor. Though, it still has some problems with GPS. And there are still no such useful functions as MMS sending, voiced dialing. The 2-megapixel built-in camera can not be compared with the 8-megapixel cameras of the concurrent smartphones.