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Impressions of the iPhone 3G S
By Dave Peterson | June 19, 2009
If you go back and look at the first post I ever put up on GadgetyTech, the first thing I did was wish for a 32 GB iPhone. It took a year and a half, but that’s a wish I can now cross off my list. Storage capacity had always been my major disappointment with the iPhone with the inability to play Flash videos running a close second (still waiting on that one).
After that, one of the most immediately noticeable improvements of the iPhone 3G S is the smudge and fingerprint resistant glass, which really does work as advertised. Fingerprints from a momentary contact like typing or pressing an on-screen button are much less apparent, and smudges that do occur when doing something like flicking between screens are much easier to clean off.
Many people, myself included, were a bit puzzled trying to get the new battery percentage indicator to show. Thanks to TUAW for giving the simple instructions: It must be enabled by going to Settings > General > Usage > Battery Percentage and setting the slider to On. For the last few weeks, I’ve been using an app called FreeMemory, a nifty little memory manager for the iPhone. One of its side benefits has been a percentage display of remaining battery power. It will be nice to have that on the face of the phone.
The digital compass can be a little touchy, and thrown off by electrical fields around it (like those generated by a notebook computer), but generally it looks like it will be useful for determining the basic direction you are facing. Direction can be delivered by either magnetic or true North.
The new camera takes predictably clearer pictures and the ability to tap an area in your composition where you want to set focus is a very nice and easy to use feature. The video function is straight forward, and allows trimming the beginning and end points of your video. On playback, a scrubber line is displayed at the top of the frame; to enter Trim mode, just touch one end or the other of the scrubber, and drag it in to the point where you want the video to begin or end.
The changes from the iPhone 3G to the 3G S are not dramatic for the most part, but do make the phone more versatile and nicer to work with. Now I can just hope that I don’t fill 32 GB as quickly as I did 16 GB.
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