The iPhone 3G: Still Great & Still Imperfect
Anand’s Corner by Anand Lal Shimpi
Anand Lal Shimpi has turned a fledgling personal page on GeoCities.com into one of the world’s most visited and trusted PC hardware sites. Anand started his site in 1997 at just 14 years old and has since been featured in USA Today, CBS’ “48 Hours,” and Fortune. His site—www.anandtech.com—receives more than 55 million page views and is read by more than 2 million readers per month.

It’ll take years for Apple to match the hype and uncertainty that surrounded the first one, as it was a once-in-a-blue-moon revolutionary device, doomed to be followed up by evolutionary iterations every year.

2008 marks the first such evolutionary iteration with the introduction of the iPhone 3G. As the name implies, the iPhone 3G enables support for 3G wireless networks, but there is more that comes with the new phone.

The iPhone 3G is cheaper up front, selling for $199 or $299, depending on configuration (8GB or 16GB), but AT&T’s data plans have gone up in price, making the total cost of ownership higher over a two-year period compared to the original iPhone. The monthly fees aren’t terrible for a data plan, but they aren’t economical; you’ll pay the standard amount for a voice plan plus an extra $30 per month for unlimited data. If you want ungodly expensive text messages, they will cost you an additional $5 to $20 every month. It’s the pricier data plans that negate the lower cost of the phone, but the difference doesn’t amount to that much more over two years. Just don’t be fooled, the new iPhone isn’t exactly any cheaper than the old one, it’s simply on a deferred payment plan.

The addition of 3G support makes things faster, but how much really depends on where you are and how you use your phone. The first factor is very important, because there are areas where AT&T lacks 3G coverage. There’s a very popular beach town around two hours from my home called Wilmington. It seems like everyone I meet these days is either from there or lived there for a period of time. There’s a big school down there, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and it’s a fun place to visit. The problem? There’s absolutely no 3G coverage, which is odd given that the town’s full of college students eager to shell out tuition money for shiny new iPhones.

Most metropolitan areas I’ve traveled to, however, do have reasonable 3G coverage, which brings us to the usage factor. 3G can easily offer two to 10 times the download speed of Edge, but you notice it most on larger, image-heavy Web sites rather than small sites constituted mostly of text. 3G is always faster, but it doesn’t give you the Wi-Fi experience.

The new iPhone ships with network-assisted GPS, but no turn-by-turn voice direction software. This ultimately amounts to a GPS feature that’s great if you have a navigator in the car with you, or a nice walking GPS, but not much else. It’s good at telling you where you are, but don’t throw away your Tom Tom just yet.

The iPhone 3G ships with the long-anticipated 2.0 firmware (also available for the original phone). The app store is the biggest addition, allowing you to download and install third-party applications without jailbreaking your phone. The quality of the applications ranges from downright poor to decent, with a few selections reaching first-party quality. Most of them tend to be battery hogs, though; as useful as the AIM app is, for example, it will eat through your battery in a couple hours of steady use.

The 3G’s battery life in general is terrible. The old iPhone would get me through a day ending at 5 p.m. (unfortunately my days end closer to 10 p.m. when I’m traveling), but the iPhone 3G won’t even get me that far. I need at least two full charges a day while traveling, which can be difficult if I’m spending much of my time in airports. There’s no replaceable battery, either, so you’ll occasionally find yourself searching for power outlets.

Ultimately, the iPhone 3G amounts to little more than an incremental improvement over the original phone. The iPhone continues to be the premier smartphone out there, but Apple needs to be careful; adding complaints alongside desire is a risky approach to incremental improvement. If the increments are small enough, and the complaints pile up high enough, Apple’s wonderphone may lose its appeal. 

——————Taken from CPU Magazine which I HIGHLY recommend for you tech enthusiasts out there