APPLE 3G iphone
APPLE 3G iphone launched worldwide last Friday (Japan, Hong Kong, US, Europe), the new iphone comes with the following pricing:
1) 8GB (USD 199) and 16GB (USD 299) in the United States. It is cheaper compare to the original iphone which was sold at USD 399 (8GB) and USD 499 (16GB).
2) User now needs to activate at AT&T on the spot to stem phones from flowing into black market especially in ASIA and users unlocking the device.
3) User now needs to spend USD 59.99 per month + USD 30 for unlimited data plan on AT&T package with 2 years locked contract.
APPLE 3G iphone comes with following new features. 3G chip from Infineon. GPS chip from BROADCOM. A new multi-touch touchscreen LCD panel from SHARP. Firmware 2.0 software. Rear cover changed to plastic white. Improves phone audio quality.
According to Anandtech, 3G iphones clocked a download rate of 1Mbps which is 10X faster than EDGE 110kbps, but strangely webpage loading doesn’t show up any faster. Comparing to Wi Fi running over fiber optic of 3Mbps, the popular webpages still load a lot slower, 9 seconds on facebook vs 4 seconds over Wi Fi. Battery life also runs out faster with 3 hours web surfing vs 5 hours web surfing with Wi Fi.
On the GPS side, it is working but lack the voice-assisted software which is the same when compare to most smartphones like Nokia N95, Nokia N810 etc. User is expected to pay extra for a 3rd party application to enable the voice-assisted feature.
On the new multi-touch touchscreen, Anandtech said it has again improved to offer much smoother experience, so smooth that it only shows the SAMSUNG microp powering the iphone is underpower. Using GPS and 3G also tax the iphone microp a lot, showing sign of sluggishness and slow.
On the firmware 2.0 software, many applications seem to be lack of polished and far from perfect. There are some new touches to the software like when you rotate the phone the normal calculator will change to a scientific one.
The reason the rear cover change was to allow the GPS to function because GPS receives very weak signal pulses in the atmosphere sent out by SATELLITEs. (about -130 dbm, atmosphere noise is -174 dbm/hz) Having the original cover may impair GPS performance. By changing the rear cover, automatically the phone reception had also improved hence better audio quality.
Iphone 3G is no doubt still a great user experience for many first time owners, but if you are not a first time owner, you may find it less appealing. While having 3G is cool, but the exorbitant charges by telco may make it uncool. Many users in the end may fall back from 3G to free open standard Wi Fi services for web surfing, thus leaving the 3G feature to go unused.
To me iphone 3G looks like a rushed product and it will be even better if more time and resources is spent to integrate the hardware + software to enrich the user experience. Instead of a perfect phone, many features either lack of polishing or come with a price of need to pay more for it.
So for existing iphone user, I think buying iphone for 3G+GPS is not a wise choice, why not wait for next year when Wimax iphone becomes available.
