The big boys from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and
USA Today have all posted advance reviews of the iPhone 3G. The
verdict? If you already have an iPhone, wait for the 2.0 software. The
new features are nice, but not that nice.
This, of course, applies only to the US market, where AT&T's 3G
coverage is poor, and to lesser extent to the other countries lucky
enough to have had the first-gen iPhone. Everyone else will have no
choice: it's 3G or nothing. We already know that the only real
differences are the 3G and the GPS, but the hands-on reviews reveal a
few new nuggets of information.
David Pogue says that "audio quality [...] has taken a gigantic step
forward. You sound crystal clear to your callers, and they sound
crystal clear to you. In fact, few cellphones sound this good." He also
points out that Apple told him that the GPS antenna is too small for
real turn-by-turn directions, although an on-screen dot will follow you
around.
Walt
Mossberg bemoans the shrinking battery life caused by the power hungry
3G radio: "I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping
below 20% by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it
entirely ran out of juice on one day." Mossberg also points to what
could be an annoying limitation in the iPhone's Exchange support: If
you sync your contacts and calendars with an Exchange server, it wipes
out your private calendars and address book which come from your Mac or
PC. We guess that, in the Apple way of doing things, having two address
books would simply be too messy.
And Edward Baig, while still moaning about the lack of a
real keyboard, points out that the new shaped handset doesn't fit into
older third party accessories: "I couldn't juice up the latest device
using my Bose SoundDock or Belkin car kit." And although Baig couldn't
actually access the App Store yet, he found that the iPhone has a basic
support for haptics, or at least force feedback. When playing the
driving game, Cro-Mag Rally (yes, it's still around), a crash causes
the iPhone to vibrate. This means that the vibrator is open to
developers, which could lead to some, shall we say, interesting
implementations.
All in all the real star, according to the tech triumvirate, is the
App Store, which every current iPhone owner will have access to. This
is probably the secret sauce that will allow the iPhone to take over
the world, taking it from being a mere cellphone to being, as Jobs said
in his WWDC keynote speech, a major computing platform.
Oh yeah -- why are we showing you only Mossberg's video review? Pogue doesn't have one yet and Baig's is not embeddable.
