Apple's newest iPhone, the iPhone 3GS, doesn't appear to be all that different from the iPhone 3G that has been with us for more than a year, largely because the form factor and outward design of the iPhone has not changed from one model to the next. Apple's continued sale of the iPhone 3G alongside the 3GS at a reduced price of $99 serves as a nice marketing move by the company to make sure that both devices remain relevant. Combine that with the release of iPhone OS 3.0 that brings a whole slew of new features to the entire iPhone and iPod touch platform, and it's pretty easy to misconceive the iPhone 3GS as an incremental update to the platform. 

However, after spending several weeks with a 16GB iPhone 3GS, it is clear to this reviewer that judging the iPhone 3GS as anything less than a drastic improvement over the iPhone 3G is a mistake. The vast difference between the two devices will inevitably become more clear as AT&T's network improves and catches up with the faster capabilities of the iPhone 3GS and as a new breed of software, particularly games, begins to be released for the iPhone 3GS that will not function—or not function as well—on the slower and less-graphically gifted iPhone 3G.

S stands for Speed

There are plenty of examples of the iPhone 3GS's improved speed. Thanks to a CNET video, we know that the iPhone 3GS boots up in about 20 seconds whereas the iPhone 3G takes a little over twice the time at 48 seconds, and the Palm Pre is left in the dust by both iPhones, as it takes about one minute and 48 seconds to boot. Medialets tested the performance of JavaScript on the iPhone 3GS in comparison to the first generation iPhone, the iPhone 3G, the T-Mobile G1, and the Palm Pre, and found that the 3GS is not only faster than all the other models, but it's even faster than what Apple claims. My favorite example of the 3GS's improved speed, however, is probably the Peggle launch video comparing Peggle launching on an iPhone 3G vs on the iPhone 3GS. I love Peggle and it was the first game that I launched on the iPhone 3GS and I was blown away by how much faster it performed than on my first generation iPhone. 

The one area where the iPhone 3GS is not clearly faster than the iPhone 3G is in wireless connectivity speeds on AT&T's 3G network. Gizmodo did a reader poll test in Chicago and discovered that the iPhone 3GS wasn't significantly faster, even though Chicago was supposed to be one of the cities with a faster 3G network. After Gizmodo's report was live and resulted in an explosion of discussion online, however, AT&T contacted them, and they updated their test with the following information: "AT&T tells us that the trial is only live in Chicago on a handful of cell sites and on an internal basis, so none of you guys should be connecting to the faster network. The public trials are coming later this year, so it makes sense that the speeds are exactly the same." [Emphasis mine.] This information from AT&T debunks Gizmodo's entire test.

And there's the big catch with the iPhone 3GS's speed: None of us know yet how much faster than the iPhone 3G it really is. The wireless chip inside the iPhone 3GS is capable of supporting speeds of 7.2Mbps, but AT&T's 3G network is still sputtering along at a much slower rate. This means that there's not much difference between the wireless performance between the 3G and the 3GS except for the speed gains that the device gets thanks to the processor being faster and the additional RAM. The first generation iPhone and the iPhone 3GS both feature processors running at 412Mhz with 128MBs of RAM, while the iPhone 3GS's processor is an 833Mhz processor that is currently only running at 600Mhz with 256MBs of RAM. The graphics processing power in the iPhone 3GS has also been improved, doubling the speed found in the iPhone and iPhone 3G, and becoming the first iPhone to support OpenGL ES 2.0.

So, we have a faster processor that is running underclocked at 600Mhz, we have a faster wireless card that has no faster 3G network to connect to, and we have a faster graphics card capable of supporting a better and more advanced graphics protocol, but no software written specifically for that better graphics processor yet. What happens when Apple revs up the processor capabilities on the iPhone 3GS to its full 833Mhz via a firmware upgrade? What happens when AT&T updates its network? What happens when OpenGL ES 2.0 video games start being released in the App Store?

When these things happen, that's when we'll clearly find out how much faster the iPhone 3GS is than the iPhone 3G, and that's when there will be a clear difference between the two models and people will realize that the 3GS is an evolutionary step above the 3G.

Knowing how Apple tends to operate, my guess is that Apple is coordinating all of this to nicely sync up with AT&T's improvements of its network and the $99 sale of the iPhone 3G to get rid of all the back inventory of parts in Apple's warehouses. Once that marketing clearing house is complete, sales of the iPhone 3G will be discontinued, and Apple will suddenly crank up the 3GS's capabilities via a firmware update in order to convince everyone who didn't upgrade before to spend the money on a brand new (and magically improved) 3GS.

Auto-focus camera

The iPhone 3GS features a new and improved three mega-pixel camera that includes auto-focus and auto-white-balance and is capable of taking close up, macro shots. Even better, the autofocus can be easily adjusted on the fly by simply touching the screen in the area where you want the picture to be focused. As Apple has shown off in their promotional videos for the iPhone 3GS, this makes for some very cool shots in well and evenly lit areas, however, the auto-white balance adjusting with the focus can result in some drastic changes in color in unevenly lit scenarios.

Figure 1: The shot on the left was set to focus on the farthest point in the middle, while the shot on the right was set to focus on the tree.

In Figure 1 above, you can clearly see how the auto-white balance results in some highly contrasted shots taken from the same location if the lighting scenario is not even. This can be useful, however, as you can see the somewhat close-up shot of the fire hydrant in Figure 2 focuses on all the dirty detail of the hydrant, while in Figure 3, I'm focusing on my rarely photographable black pug and she shows up clearly with detail in her dark coat while the same hydrant in this scenario comes through much lighter in a bright smudge of colors. Also notice the color shift of the grass from the dark green in Figure 2 to the light-green and yellowish grass in Figure 3. The actual color of the grass photographed is much closer to the dark grass depicted in Figure 2, but even that has been darkened more than necessary by the white balance focus on the silver highlights of the hydrant head.

Figure 2: Close-up focus on the dark top of the hydrant.

Figure 3: Focus is on the shoulders of my dark black pug, Thatcher

Once you know what you're shooting with, however, and are aware of what the auto-focus and auto-white balance means, the iPhone 3GS's camera can be put to good use. There is an iPhone 3GS Users pool on Flickr that nicely illustrates the types of images (and some videos) that people have been able to take with the new iPhone 3GS camera:

The one thing that is clearly lacking from the camera, which was also lacking from the previous cameras in the iPhone, is any sort of zoom, digital or real. However, there is at least one app currently in the App Store that offers zoom, but it's in need of an update to work nicely with iPhone OS 3.0. 

Video

The iPhone 3GS is also the only iPhone to support recording video, which is a huge advancement for the iPhone line. As with most first generation features, the video recording has a few issues that could have been handled better by Apple. Right now, the 3GS shoots 640x480 VGA quality video at 30 frames per second, which is roughly the equivalent of the video that can be shot by the Flip Mino camera. The Flip Mino, however, has the ability to zoom in and out while recording.

Unlike the Flip, the iPhone 3GS can shoot video in either portrait or landscape mode, which could make for some interesting video. However, uploading any videos shot in portrait mode to YouTube results in large black bars along the sides of the video, as can be seen in the video below (no pugs were harmed in the shooting of the video):

The iPhone 3GS also offers on-device editing of the video, which is not too elaborate, only letting you trim the beginning and end points of the video. The act of trimming currently permanently overwrites the original file, so there is no way to trim two separate segments from one long video while on the device. This is definitely a problem, as it goes against all the "lossless video editing" that Apple has championed for years on both its iMovie and Final Cut video editing software platforms. However, according to leaked information about the OS 3.1 firmware update that is already in the hands of developers, with the next update Apple will allow users to write a whole new file, retaining the original unedited file on the device.

In addition to the ability to edit on the device, the iPhone 3GS also lets you upload your video from anywhere, either via WiFi or your 3G connection to YouTube. As you can see in my first impressions post on the 3GS, uploading to YouTube straight from the iPhone adds an extra level of compression and a bit more noise to the video than if you wait to upload from your computer. The raw video files on a computer look great. You can see a slightly compressed QuickTime version of our test video on Blip.TV. Unfortunately, as of now, the big hosted video partner for Apple, YouTube, is failing to present the video shot with the iPhone 3GS at a quality level that is even close to the original files. Compare the YouTube video files to the Blip.TV video file linked to in QuickTime format above and embedded via Flash below:

Another problem with the YouTube uploading on the iPhone 3GS is that if anything goes wrong, you are presented with an error message that reads "Could not publish 'TITLE OF VIDEO'" (see Figure 4 below). Rather than offering a button that says "Retry," the iPhone only offers up a simple "Close" choice which drops you back at the original video. This means, that if your video fails to upload, you can't just try again with no work, but rather you have to wait for the video to compress again and again fill out all the YouTube information before you can attempt to upload the video. On the first day that I received my iPhone 3GS when everyone was testing uploading their videos from their iPhone 3GS, I received this error multiple times in a row, which is particularly frustrating. Apple needs to build some sort of publishing to YouTube queue for the iPhone 3GS to avoid just this sort of headache.

 

Figures 4 & 5: A video failing to upload to YouTube and notification that the video is not yet available on YouTube

When a video does successfully upload, you are presented with three options: "View on YouTube," "Tell a Friend," or "Close." Choosing Tell a Friend, opens up a draft email with a link to the video on YouTube, but if you choose View on YouTube, you are immediately presented with the error featured in Figure 5 above: Video Not Yet Available. Emailing the video to a friend will result in the same error, so we're not sure how well Apple thought out this part of the video upload workflow. Considering that the iPhone 3GS supports Push notifications, it shouldn't be too difficult to have a setting where YouTube sends you a notification once your video has been processed and is ready for viewing, so that you can email it to a friend or go view it directly. It would also be nice if the embed code for the video were available somehow via the iPhone's YouTube app, as it is impossible to copy and paste the code in Mobile Safari when on YouTube.com.

You can also email videos to your friends, and this is where the on-device trimming of the videos becomes not just a feature, but a necessity. Currently, you can only send 30 second clips over email, a fact that Apple glosses over in its presentation of the ability to email video in their commercials. Shooting some fresh video and trying to send it via email only to be told the video is too long and needs to be trimmed is annoying and frustrating, especially since there is no clear information provided while trimming your video to indicate how long 30 seconds is. The one time I tried to send a video via email that I didn't shoot explicitly to be under 30 seconds, I had to trim and retrim the video 5 times before I could successfully send it over email.

There are also a few downsides to having the video feature on the iPhone 3GS as opposed to on a separate, dedicated device like the Flip Mino. Video recording sucks the battery dry faster than any other activity on the iPhone 3GS—with the one possible exception of playing graphics-intensive video games—especially if you're shooting video, then editing it on the device, and then wirelessly uploading it over a 3G connection. Video recording is the only activity on my iPhone 3GS where I've noticed the device heating up. I haven't experienced any of the severe overheating issues that some people online have reported (and this may be because I do not carry my iPhone 3GS around in a case, which may be the source of the problem according to some of the online talk). Also, the more videos you record to your device, the longer your sync times with iTunes become, as the backup operation has to backup all those video files each time you sync your 3GS.

Low light video also isn't wonderful, but this is a problem shared by standalone video cameras like the Flip Mino as well. Here's an example video of some July 4th fireworks shot from a distance of about a sixth of a mile from where the fireworks were launched:

Another glaring omission in the iPhone 3GS's video feature set is the lack of support for any type of streaming directly to the web video options, like what is offered by sites like Ustream and Qik. There has been a Qik iPhone application that allows streaming of video via an iPhone 3G for quite some time now, although it only works on jailbroken iPhones. If a third party can build such an application, why isn't Apple doing so or allowing them to implement such a feature in an Apple-sanctioned application in the App Store? Some people have cited AT&T as being the reason behind this, but considering how many people stream to Qik and Ustream now using Nokia devices on AT&T networks, we're skeptical of this answer.

The one extremely interesting thing about the iPhone 3GS's video-recording capabilities is that they may prove to one day be more advanced than Apple has currently allowed them to be. Just as the processor of the iPhone 3GS is currently underclocked, early dissections of the iPhone 3GS revealed that the device's processor, graphics processor, and camera hardware may be capable of recording 720p HD video. Of course, recording in 720p would take up more storage space on the iPhone 3GS and would also, most likely, consume more battery life on the iPhone 3GS, so Apple may never bother to unlock the potential that is in the hardware, but it's an interesting possibility for a future firmware update that ties in well with my theorizing earlier in this review about the future possible speed upgrade.

Check back for part 2 of our Obsessable review of the iPhone 3GS tomorrow morning, where we'll move to look at the voice control capabilities of the device, the built in compass, the new oleophobic screen, the battery, and a discussion of overall performance of the device, including what's missing and what we'd like to see in future models (or in future firmware upgrades to the device).