What’s everyone think of the new iPhone/iPod touch OS? 

And since this board is a little quiet, what do you new iPhone 3G S owners think about your new purchase?  Impressions are welcome.

I’ll get things started on the iPhone OS 3.0 side, with some random thoughts:

—Is battery life a little worse, or is the battery bar more accurate?  I’ll get a better idea in a few days.
—Looks like some graphics optimizations here and there.  Try Zippo lighter app under 2.x, then under 3.0.  HUGE difference.  On the other hand, some games do seem to lag just a little more than before
—Overall responsiveness seems very slightly down to me, not nearly to the same extent as the 1.1.4 to 2.0 changeover.  Another case of OS complexity = more system overhead?
—Can’t yet tell if Safari’s rendering faster
—Still getting used to cut/copy/paste, though I like that it’s there
—“iPhone 3G S only” battery percentage indicator is probably bugging me a lot more than it should, on the other hand it strikes me as idiotic to have a “%” as an “exclusive” feature when it worked on old iPhones.  Some of us like exact battery life indicators!
—Hints of bugs here and there.  I’m sure there’s more fine-tuning to come.

Responsiveness varies with app. I find Mail faster, for instance, but as-yet unpatched (for 3.0) apps sluggish. NFSU, for instance, freezes more frequently than before 3.0.

Overall, however, I’m very happy with 3.0. Spotlight, being a great time-saver, is a killer app. It also gets around the nuisance of opening Contacts and struggling with locating the search field.

Cut/copy/paste is great. I think the camera is capturing better images. Landscape keyboard is welcome but I’m so accustomed to portrait mode that I’m finding it hard to adapt.

But the most important thing is 3.0 feels such an adequate bridge between my iPhone 3G and the 3GS that I don’t feel compelled to upgrade the hardware. A good thing, seeing how I’m on contract with this phone for another year, as are many other users. In any case, the iPhone still rocks. I love it, and still haven’t seen a competitor that matches the quality of the user experience the iPhone offers.

I gave the iPhone 3GS a try at the local Apple Store recently.  Undoubtedly a big speed/smoothness improvement over the last two iPhones.  On the other hand, it wasn’t so drastically improved that my current iPhone feels hopelessly obsolete.  A few notes:

—Camera, oh yeah, definitely cool.  Being able to shoot nice quality video that’s fairly smooth, it advances the smartphone state of the art, at least for usability. 

—I could still get the interface to be ever-so-slightly less than perfectly smooth without trying very hard.  It’s smoother but still not flawless, despite the CPU/GPU/RAM upgrade.  Some games either look framerate-capped, or not yet optimized for iPhone 3.0/the new GPU.  Perhaps some less-than-perfect smoothness in the interface (say, menu scrolling) is there by design to save a little on rendering/battery.

—Battery life looks to be about the same, which is fine considering what more the iPhone can do, but I do wish 3G Internet/voice wasn’t such a drain.  About the battery meter, seeing it tick down a point every 2-3 minutes is kinda unnerving, I gotta say.  Gruber over at Daring Fireball does have a point about that.  Still, I never did find the big charging battery icon to be especially accurate.  I think a % and estimated time to full charge at least when the iPhone is plugged in should be standard on all iPhones if possible.

Overall, I like where the iPhone 3GS is at (I still think there’s room to optimize the OS), and at the same time, I don’t feel so bad about holding out for the possibility of a dual-core iPhone in June 2010.  =)

I’m waiting for the quad-core, providing my iPhone 3G doesn’t give out before then.

You’ll probably have to wait for a quad-core iMac to come out before that comes anywhere close to happening.

(Partly kidding, the smartphone arena is a very, very different space, and the very idea of a dual-core phone fairly close on the heels of ubiqitous dual-core computing is astounding.)

(And also, I’ve got no problems with my Gen 1 2.4GHz Aluminum iMac, though I suppose it helps that I’ve yet to run anything that really brings the system to its knees, as Starcraft 2 is sure to do when it inevitably comes out in 2011 with late 2009 minimum requirements.)

I had been waiting for the iPhone to get the exact features I wanted ever since it was introduced.  That happened with the 3GS and I am in heaven!  The thing is utterly addictive!  So much so that everything I got had to be exactly right.  I can’t tell you how many hours/nights I’ve spent searching the Internet for just the right case at just the right price.  I was, unfortunately, forced to buy a case when I got my iPhone because I simply couldn’t have a naked one laying around here with canid toothis lurking to close her 15-month-old jaws around it and bite down.  Not to mention that it could actually FALL from someplace.

Well, tonight—or rather last night—I finally loaded up the music I wanted and, lo and behold, I found both the case AND the car charger I wanted at really good prices.  I can return the case from Apple, and the other one that arrived that was simply the wrong one, and get my money back.  This is going to be a very, very expensive month since I also got MobileMe which I have yet to try out.

Everything is superduper good, but I am bone tired.  I only have a few hours to sleep before attending a wedding this afternoon.  My uncle’s wife will be jealous as hell when she sees my new phone because that’s just the kind of person she is.  I do so love using her shallowness against her. 

Well, I’ve finally found a really big (IMO) flaw in the iPhone.  The camera has no zoom feature.  For some reason I thought that the camera had added zooming, but it hasn’t.  What was added was the ability to change/select the focus.  I guess that’s good, but I’d rather have 4X zoom.  I know there’s a case that will add zoom, but I’ve already ordered the case I want and I don’t feel like ordering yet another one since that would be case #4.  I’ll just have to make do. 

MacTad - 06 July 2009 05:34 PM

Well, I’ve finally found a really big (IMO) flaw in the iPhone.  The camera has no zoom feature.  For some reason I thought that the camera had added zooming, but it hasn’t.  What was added was the ability to change/select the focus.  I guess that’s good, but I’d rather have 4X zoom.  I know there’s a case that will add zoom, but I’ve already ordered the case I want and I don’t feel like ordering yet another one since that would be case #4.  I’ll just have to make do. 

I’ll have to disagree here.  I have ZERO desire for digital zoom and introducing optical zoom means one more moving part that can break.

I’ve been very happy with the 3.0 update on my 16GB iPhone 3G.

- Copy and Paste is invaluable. Possibly the most useful addition from my perspective.
- Push is handy and works well. Primarily I’m using it for notification of incoming IM messages because I stay signed in with BeejiveIM. Honestly it’s not all that important, but it does let me scale back my txt message use in favor of IM for quick back-and-forth messages.
- I like the ability to email multiple photos in one message.

No problems, just incremental improvements. I only wish my iPhone’s battery lasted several days under heavy load. I use my iPhone so much that I barely make it through one day before I start getting low-battery warnings. That has nothing to do with 3.0, though.