My Tech: iPhone 3GS

I posted a tweet on this but felt that it needed a bit more detail.

I have now owned or had come through my house five iPod / iPhone devices -

1. an older style iPod (5th gen I think);
2. an iPod Touch 16gb;
3. an iPod Nano (my wife's);
4. an iPhone 3G 16gb;
5. an iPhone 3GS 32gb.

That a lot of hardware that has cost me and my family a lot of money.

Ignoring the standard iPod's for a moment the Touch to iPhone upgrades that I have made have been on the back of wanting more: more connectivity, more memory, more functionality. That's not to say that the Touch wasn't a good device, it was. The introduction of OS 2 and the App Store gave it an amazing lease of life, showing what an amazing platform Apple was developing.

But unless I was near a wifi network it felt held back, like a car with only 3 gears. The apps only highlighted that even more so.

Equally the iPhone 3G is a great device, adding connectivity to the equation. The 3G element gave fast data to an already strong platform.

And now there is the iPhone 3GS, bringing a far better camera, video, more storage and a generally faster overall experience in main usage. This device cost me a small fortune but I never had a second thought about it.

So why do I feel the need to upgrade outside of the main added features? I realised the reason why only a few days ago. And it really surprised me. The iPhone covers 75% of my daily needs of the internet. And the iPhone excels -

• Twitter - I never expected to be addicted sending and reading tweets but I am. I have and continue to meet many interesting people who have interesting things to say. The iPhone has many Twitter apps that make using the service on the go a dream. Twittelator Pro is my favourite at the moment.
• Web - the iPhone's Safari browser is very impressive, allowing me to do almost everything that I want to do at any time. The only thing that it misses is a Flash implementation but I don't hit too many problems with that at the moment.
• Email - similar to the web usage, the in built web client is fine for my basic needs and OS 3 has added server side searching.
• IM - I never was much of an IM user but seem to have got in to it more and more over the last few months. With the push notifications that OS 3 introduced IM works just as well as text messaging. I use BeejiveIM.

When you consider where we were with mobile technology only a few years back it can be nothing short of amazing how far we have come in devices and expectations.

I love my iPhone. Apple have me well and truly hooked and I'm not complaining.

My Tech

Comments

[Mac]

The only thing I'm waiting for the iPhone to include is the ability to run applications in the background. I know the Palm Pre now supports this, so maybe apple will be inspired to include it. It would be nice to be able to keep AIM up and running to receive messages etc.

[athinkingman]

I'm looking forward to upgrading my iPhone 3G at some stage in the future. I can't imagine being without mine now. Being able to carry the internet around in your pocket (for most of the time) is really satisfying. Being quite a saddo, I find myself using the News (ITN) and Radio Times apps quite a lot in addition to the Twitter ones.

[acetuk]

Regarding background apps - I don't personally see that happening any time soon due to the problem of battery life. We know through the jailbrake groups that background apps can and do work on the iPhone so technically it isn't an issue.

Personally the new push notification system and the extra speed of the 3GS is not making this an issue for me.

Apps on the iPhone are by far the killer feature. I am now getting in to internet radio and love having my own DAB international player with me all of the time. Also with the prospect of more travelling coming up for work having films and music to listen to as well as ebooks to read are something that I now cannot do without.