Apple iPhone 3GS Review

Apple iPhone 3GS, the predecessor’s of normal iPhone 3G, has hit the market with faster processing and network speeds, more memory, extended battery life and with other additional features. Its performance boost, sharper camera with video and the improved battery life make the iPhone 3GS a much more balanced smartphone. iPhone 3GS is the first iPhone which comes with preinstalled iPhone OS 3.0.

Design:

Apple iPhone 3GS looks similar like the previous model. It has the same shape and the same external controls, but 3GS is the unique in many ways. iPhone 3GS comes in two colors – black and white. It comes with 115.5x62.1x12.3 mm dimensions and weighs around 135g. This phone’s dimension is same as its predecessor, but weigh slight heavier.

Apple iPhone 3GS has the TFT capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors. Its display has 320x480 pixels of resolution with 3.5 inches of widescreen multi-touch display with fingerprint resistant oleo phobic coating. The SIM card slot, power button, and 3.5mm audio headset jack is situated at the top of the device. In the right side of the device, you can see the camera activation/capture key using which you can access camera faster. At the bottom, mic and loudspeaker is situated, but there is only one loudspeaker, which is not enough. But, Apple have tuned the loudspeaker performance because of which the sound is now louder than the before.

The back side of the iPhone 3GS has the fingerprint magnet which is much harder to clean it. You can also see the camera lens on the back side. The camera functionality is somewhat improved with higher resolution, autofocus, and video recording.

Features:

Apple iPhone 3GS has the same features as in the iPhone 3G, but with some additional features. As I said above, iPhone 3GS is the first iPhone which shipped with preinstalled iPhone OS 3.0. It has faster 600MHz CPU with 256 MB of RAM. The iPhone 3GS is faster in all the aspects like starting the menus, programs, and the responsiveness of the screen auto rotation. The iPhone 3GS boots the iPhone 3.0 OS in just 15 seconds. If you try to boot iPhone 3G, then it will take double the time.

The iPhone 3GS has the Search option called Spotlight which, by default, searches in the 9 places, i.e. contacts, applications, mail, notes, music, audio books, video and podcasts, and finally in calendar. You can change the priority of the result listing. iPhone 3GS comes with HTML Safari web browser using which you can browse the internet, read/write Emails and so on.

iPhone 3GS has two new features which you cannot find it in the iPhone 3G. They are Magnetic Compass and Voice Control. The Voice Control app supports many of the commands like call a phone number, playing the musing by song or artist or album name, shuffling the music and so on. The recognition of Voice Control is speaker-independent so you no need to pre-record your voice commands. It supports over 30 local variations. To open the Voice Control app, just hold and press the Home key. This interface is simple. If you pronounce a command correctly, then the app will respond. If the command is wrong, then the app quits automatically. But the problem is whenever you pronounce wrong command you have to restart the application to retry the command.

Magnetic Compass works in Google Maps and any other third party maps and it also has its own application. This app will allows you to view the exact GPS co-ordinates. This app seems very inaccurate at times. However, in Google Maps, the maps auto rotation is very accurate.

iPhone 3GS has also optimized some of the features for disabled people like Voice Over, Interface Zoom and Whit-on-black color combo. It helps the disabled people to use the phone without any issues.

The call quality of the phone is just fine, but whereas the messaging has been greatly improved. You can send SMS, Multimedia messages, and Email. iPhone 3GS includes audio and video players and TV-out features. It has 32GB internal memory so you can store 100 dialled, received, and missed calls entries each. Apart from these, it has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP, and microUSB v2.0.

iPhone 3GS has 3.15 megapixel camera with touch-focus and geo-tagging features. You can record a video with a VGA resolution at 30 frames per second. It has Lithium Ion Standard battery. It offers the Standby up to 300 hours with the Talk time up to 12 hours for 2G and up to 5 hours for 3G. The audio playback will offer you up to 30 hours of battery life.

This phone has already hit the market with the available price of $299 for 32 GB and $199 for 16 GB. The newly introduced changes in both hardware level and software level, will make the new iPhone 3GS a more balanced smartphone.