It’s probably no surprise that my refrain around my house is, “I want an iPhone 3GS.”
I also happy to report that, despite not getting one for Father’s Day as perhaps I’d hoped, I did, at least, get a promissory note for one in late July/early August. (The issue is not really the upfront cost of the phone but the ridiculous monthly service cost, which is $15 a month more than the original iPhone.)
First let’s talk about my old iPhone. The 3.0 OS upgrade as not been good for my iPhone. Despite the welcome addition of cut/paste, push notifications and all the other iPhone OS 3.0 goodness, my phone is now dog-slow. Keyboard responsiveness is in the dumps, and often gets 10 seconds behind my typing. Some programs (not all) open at agonizingly slow speeds, and while push notices seem to work fine in the background, my e-mail doesn’t. Sometimes the phone will go 4 hours or more without receiving an e-mail, but as soon as I go into the e-mail program, all my mail over the last few hours suddenly downloads.
I’m going to assume (hope) that these are teething bugs in the 3.0 version of the OS and that a 3.0.1 will be out any day soon (much like 2.0 had very similar problems) to fix them all, rather than the inevitable obsolescence of my original phone. Since there’s not that much technological difference between the iPhone and the iPhone 3G, I can’t imagine that this is the end for the iPhone just yet.
I even went as far yesterday as to wipe my phone and load it from scratch. What a pain in the rear that is! I didn’t want to re-load any problems from my backups, so I had to do the clean sweep and manually re-configure the phone. It took hours. To be fair, it helped a little, but the phone is still not receiving mail regularly and the keyboard starts to lag very quickly. Here’s to the arrival of 3.0.1 (and hopefully not having to wait for 3.0.2.)
So, that said, a co-worker and I went down to the nearby Apple Store and gave the 3GS a good 15-20 minute, side-by-side comparison to my iPhone for speed tests. Wow! Fast barely describes it – and I don’t mean network speed. The new phone has a huge improvement in operational performance. Programs zip open, even Google Earth is more responsive than on my desktop. It’s just one mean, fast phone. I can hardly wait.