Friday, December 5, 2008

Livin with the 3G

Update - I am now increasingly happy with the performance of the 3G phone, especially since you can now get it for $99 as a refurb. The GPS apps and 3G speed take this new phone to the next level. Highly recommended, just charge it every night...

Sold my first gen iPhone on eBay, and now I am starting to wish I had it back. Don't get me wrong, the new iPhone 3G feels lighter and is easier to handle, and has GPS. But what I thought was going to be an end all solution has turned out to cause a couple issues:

1) Under my typical use, the 3G antenna kills the battery in under 12 hours. I have to keep switching it on/off to keep the iPhone from dying. One thing is better - it must have a more efficient Wifi antenna, because Wifi is no longer a huge drain. Either way, I need some toggle buttons on the home screen to switch the Wifi/3G antennas off - as it is, I'm stuck diving into menus each time I want to change their operation

2) The iPhone 3G doesn't charge using my truck's Alpine iPod system. A couple of my home chargers are now also out of work. Moral of this story - if you have some fancy iPod connection in your car, test it out before you get the iPhone.

3) I miss the aluminum finish. I am a huge fan of the aluminum designs of Apple's latest products, and they took a step back to plastic with the iPhone This was probably to save weight and make it more impact resistant, so I will let it slide.

Overall, I would only recommend upgrading to the iPhone 3G under the following conditions:
1) You are intensly frustrated with the Edge network of the original iPhone
2) You tend to get really lost and need GPS rather than just the triangulation of the original iPhone
3) You must be the coolest person in your office and have the latest device in order to retain a nick-name referecing your techincal prowess - something like "tech-guy" or "electro-man" or something like that....don't have any other examples....promise

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