Digital Trends

Apple iPhone 3G 16GB

September 22nd, 2008 | by Mike Kobrin

Navigating the Interface

The iPhone 2.0 software is simply excellent. The multi-touch interface lets you swipe, pinch, expand, and tap around very quickly with no lags and top-notch accuracy. Rearranging icons on the home screen is now a piece of cake, which is important since you can add tons of apps and Web pages to it.

The intelligent virtual keyboard pops up when you need it, and over the last year or so of living with the previous iPhone, we're able to type way faster on it than we ever have on any phone's physical keyboard. That's partly because the iPhone's keyboard adjusts for the way you type on it, dynamically resizing touch zones for keys based on usage patterns. The predictive text feature works great, though you can disable it. 

Calling Someone

Ultimately the iPhone is a phone. The original iPhone took a lot of heat for poor call quality, and thankfully the iPhone 3G's call quality is very good. The earpiece ad speakers could be a bit louder, but the clarity in both incoming and outgoing audio is excellent, especially via 3G.

As with the original model, the phone's accelerometer and proximity sensor respond very well, locking the screen at the appropriate times to prevent accidental button presses. And visual voicemail is still one of our favorite features.

Email

The updated email client works with IMAP and POP3 accounts and has presets for Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, and Apple's MobileMe accounts, but the big story is Microsoft Exchange support, making the iPhone a viable business phone. MS Exchange ActiveSync also lets you wirelessly sync contacts and calendars, and you can receive email on the phone as soon as it hits the server. Setup is simplest if your company uses Exchange 2007, thanks to an Autodiscovery feature that automatically finds the server address for you.

The email client now lets you trash or move multiple messages at once, which is a big plus, but you still can't search email, which is often a major pain. (You can work around this by using your email provider's web-based client instead.) At least you can search you contacts, which is handy if you've got hundreds to choose from. Attachment support is solid: You can view PDF, JPEG, Word, Excel, and PPT files right in the email client.

Messaging

The iPhone's threaded text-messaging app is easy to use and conveniently lets you pick up threads where you left off. Oddly, you still can't send picture or video messages; this is one of the features that we expected but never appeared. The again, we're just as happy sending our pictures directly from the camera app via email.

Taking Pics/Video

The iPhone's 2-megapixel camera appears to be identical in quality to the original, which is to say pretty good outdoors and somewhat iffier indoors. The GPS chip enables third-party apps like SnapMyLife to geotag your photos and share them locally.

Surfing the Web

Web surfing is noticeably faster with 3G than EDGE, and the network type the iPhone is currently using is displayed in the top left corner of the screen. AT&T's coverage isn't always consistent, but in New Orleans we usually got between 2 and 4 bars of 3G, only very occasionally running into EDGE territory.

With 2 to 3 bars of 3G, we experienced load times of 5 to 10 seconds for sites like CNN Mobile, Apple.com, Amazon.com, and Craiglist.org. Sites with lots of pictures on the front page, including DigitalTrends.com, NYTimes.com, and BBCnews.com took a bit longer, at 15 to 25 seconds. We haven't run into any site compatibility issues yet, but let us know in the forums.

Our favorite enhancement is the ability to touch and hold a picture on the Web and save it to your iPhone. Alas, there's still no cut and paste feature.