Apple iPhone 3GS review

This same drag and slide technique is employed in the new video recording feature that is one of the highlights of the new 3GS. Video is captured at 640 x 480 resolution at 30 frames per second and the quality as you might expect is reasonable without being spectacular. Ease of use is as always with Apple the priority, and the phone is smart enough now to record sideways video, so whether you hold your iPhone is portrait or landscape mode is will play back right-way-up. Videos can also be geotagged so you can establish their location at a later date.
After you’ve recorded your video you can drag a box round the frames of your video chopping out bits at the beginning and end. Tap the menu button and you can choose to email it, send via SMS, send to MobileMe if you subscribe, or upload to YouTube. YouTube has reported an upsurge in uploads since the iPhone was released a week ago, indicating that it’s a well liked feature.
Perhaps the iPhone’s greatest strength is its use as an internet device and the faster speed boosts it further and keeps it ahead of the crowd. Pinching and zooming in and out with the two fingered multi-touch concept is smoother than ever and the extra memory means multiple tabs can be open without slowdown - currently we’re at eight with no issue.
Of course, the biggest downer is that there’s still no Flash support, which is a real and significant downer on the internet experience. We can imagine that when this issue is cracked, the iPhone will do it very well, but right now, its absence weighs more heavily than ever.

iPhone 3.0 OS

The rest of the improvements are those that come with the iPhone 3.0 update and these are available on the two older models as well. Highlights include Spotlight search now integrated into the OS. Simply slide left from the Home screen and you can search for emails and apps. You can even search your Gmail account and messages stored on the server. Push for Gmail is still absent however.

We also really liked the new improvements in the media application – when you’re listening to audio podcasts you can now skip backwards in 30 second chunks and listen at either half or two times speed, great for skipping the ads or boring bits.

However, the lack of multi-tasking is beginning to be an issue. While videos can remember their states, applications can’t, which means you can’t check say, check something on your phone while using the Skype application. With devices such as the Palm Pre able to support full multi-tasking, and Windows Mobile having done it for a while, (even if not very well) the iPhone’s one app at a time approach makes for a very linear experience.

As a pure business device the email capabilities are attractive, particularly now it’s had Exchange support for a good while, and larger companies can create custom apps specific for the phone. Apple’s approval process means that this will only be an option for the really large companies however. Those some companies also may prefer to stick to BlackBerry due to the iPhone’s lack of central manageability.

Battery Life
In our tests we found that the iPhone didn’t last significantly longer than the 3G. If you’re using push email and GPS your battery will inevitably drain faster, and throw in some web browsing, video and game playing and you’ll still be charging every night. We managed to get through one working day with these conditions, just as we did with the 3G. While it might last longer in standby mode, it’s not a large enough increase to upgrade just on the promise of longer battery life.