My new iPhone 3G-S came in the FedEx yesterday… and after spending a couple of frustrating hours on Skype with AT&T when the delays in the activation process bricked both new and old iPhone, it finally activated and I was off to the races.

Now, I’ve spent less than 24 hours with 3G-S, but it’s a marked improvement over the 3G. Things are just a lot snappier; email opens right away, webpages render more quickly, even Sudoku is a lot faster. The compass is cool, but I really haven’t used it yet, as north and south are pretty easy to identify in a city with a square N-S-E-W grid system. The new camera with auto-focus is another thing I haven’t had much of a chance to use, but from the few test pictures I took, it’s a lot quicker, the auto-focus is cool, and the added megapixel is a welcome addition.

By far the most useful feature – one I’ve already used three or four times – is the new Spotlight search function, which finds emails, contacts, calendar items, etc. It’s about a hundred times easier than searching back through the inbox when I needed that one message. Apple’s recent history with OS X shows that they can be really good at on-machine search – and the iPhone 3.0 software is no exception.

All in all, am I happy? Yeah. I still don’t know if I’m $400 happy (the mid-tier upgrade price), but since I get to gift my old iPhone 3G to my mom (who gets all of her kids’ technology hand-me-downs) as a birthday present, I’m glad I made the purchase.

Tags: Apple, iPhone 3G-S, Technology

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 20th, 2009 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.