Apple iPhone 3G Review

In a nutshell: The iPhone 3G is an amazingly user-friendly touchscreen phone. It includes many powerful features such as GPS navigation, OS X applications, fast web browsing, Apple's famous music-playing capabilities, up to 16 GB of built-in memory, and Wi-Fi support. But at the same time it's a very expensive device that misses a number of features that we've come to expect from high-end smartphones. We recommend the new iPhone 3G S instead.

The original iPhone was a flawed beauty. It was one of the first touchscreen-driven phones, and probably the most user-friendly. It had tons of memory, and was one of the best music players on the market. Other great features included the Safari web browser, Google maps, a brilliant LCD display to make the most of the multimedia features, and WiFi support too. But on the bad side, it was phenomenally overpriced and was locked to O2. It had a very poor quality camera compared to the competition. It lacked 3G (a major problem in a multimedia phone, and the only smartphone on the market to be missing 3G) and had limited Bluetooth connectivity, with no filesharing and no support for stereo Bluetooth headsets. Battery life was also poor, and there were various other limitations, such as the omission of MMS. The whole thing clearly demonstrated Apple's lack of experience as a cell phone manufacturer.

So, one year on, has Apple learned its lessons and fixed the problems? Well, the first lesson that Apple has learned is that it needed to release the iPhone worldwide simultaneously. No waiting 6 months for the second generation to appear in the UK. 6 months is a heck of a long time in technology! So Apple learned this lesson and released the iPhone worldwide on 11 July 2008. Secondly, they learned that the first iPhone was too expensive, and so the second generation model is cheaper. Still expensive, but not quite as expensive as before. Still, let's have a reality check here - the iPhone 3G is still the most expensive smartphone on the market.

What about the phone itself? Well, clearly it's a 3G phone, so this fixes the single biggest complaint about the original iPhone. But remember that every single smartphone on the market has this feature, so this is nothing special. However, it does mean that finally the user can make the most of that huge screen and Safari web browser for a really outstanding mobile browsing experience. The 3G feature also supports the music downloading capability of the phone, and we can start to see the second generation iPhone fulfill its potential as a true multimedia device. We'd be mean not to say that it's a fantastic platform for all kinds of multimedia.

The camera is one feature that hasn't really got any better. Apple make a big deal about how user friendly the camera is - it's certainly easy to take pictures (partly because it totally lacks any useful features such as a flash, macro, autofocus, etc that all of Apple's competitors include as standard), and the photo management system is nice too, but the camera quality still lags well behind phones such as the Nokia N95 or Sony Ericsson C902. Some other stuff that we take for granted is missing too, like MMS and video calling for instance.

But the new iPhone does include some powerful new features. First up, there's GPS, combined with Google maps. With the iPhone's huge screen, this is a brilliant implementation of satellite navigation. You can use this for in-car or pedestrian navigation, and can use keyword searches to find places like nearby cafes, etc. Traffic information is also available. Another feature is the App Store, where you can browse, download and buy third-party applications for your iPhone.

So, what to conclude? The iPhone 3G is still a strange kind of phone. Some things it does incredibly well. Others it does badly. Overall it's definitely a big improvement over the original iPhone. Is it worth the money? It really depends what you want from your phone, and what kind of compromises you're willing to make.

With the release of the 3.0 software update in June 2009, Apple have raised their game a bit. The iPhone now has MMS, a copy & paste ability, a landscape keyboard, the ability to connect a Bluetooth headset and some other minor additions. First, let's just say it - "It was about time too, Apple!!!" Gosh, that feels better. Now, we'll calm down and re-assess whether any of our conclusions above are changed by this improvement. It's definitely a much improved phone, and some of the things that really irritated people about the iPhone have now gone away. On balance though, we're sticking with our 4 star rating. Not, as some have suggested, because we're "apple haters" (on the contrary, I eat one every day) but because the iPhone 3G is just about the most expensive phone on the market and it STILL doesn't have some features that much cheaper phones have got.

Features of the Apple iPhone 3G include:

• OS X Operating System
• Assisted GPS
• 2 megapixel camera
• Display: 480 x 320 pixels (3.5 inch) touchscreen
• Music player (AAC, Protected AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 1, 2, and 3), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV formats)
• Memory: 8 Gbyte or 16 Gbyte flash drive
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, USB 2.0, Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), 3.5mm headphone jack
• WAP, EDGE, HSDPA
• Size: 115 x 62 x 12.3 mm
• Weight: 133g
• Quad-band (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz) plus UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz)
• Talktime: 5 - 10 hours
• Battery standby: 300 hours
• Audio playback: Up to 24 hours