In part 1 of our Obsessable review of the iPhone 3GS, we focused on three main features of the 3GS: the notable speed increase over the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G, the improved 3-megapixel camera with auto-focus and auto-white-balance, and the new video capabilities of the iPhone 3GS.

In part 2, we 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).

Voice Control

  

Figures 1, 2, & 3: Voice Control, voice dialing, and iPod Voice Control Passcode Lock settings

The voice control features of the iPhone 3GS looked great when on display during the WWDC Keynote, but in real life, as with all voice control applications we've ever tested, Voice Control didn't work as nicely as we would have liked. Voice Control is launched by holding down on the Home button on the iPhone for about 2 seconds (or by holding down on the button in the iPhone earbuds for the same amount of time). Oddly, by default this works even with the phone locked and password-protected, bypassing the 4-digit code that normally keeps your iPhone locked when not in use. However, you can easily toggle this preference off under Settings—>General—>Passcode Lock (as in Figure 3 above).

After holding down the Home button for a few seconds the Voice Control screen comes up with a quick beep-beep noise to prompt you to speak and some wavy lines over a blue background that move when you begin to speak. Various commands that you can say also scroll past, faded slightly in the background. Calling people from our contacts list worked well when we said "Call" followed slowly by the person's name as it appears in our contacts. After doing so, the iPhone 3GS repeats back to you in a robotic female voice, "Calling NAME." If there are multiple numbers listed for an individual contact, the contact's name will appear on the screen with a notice saying, Multiple numbers, and the voice will say, "Call NAME. Home or Mobile?" Replying with one of the choices then dials that number.

You can also use the "Dial" command to actually dial a number rather than working off of your contacts list, which also works nicely if you take the time to clearly state each individual number. Unfortunately, the Voice Control isn't very intelligent and if you mistakenly say "Call" followed by a string of numbers, Voice Control doesn't realize what you are trying to do and fails, saying "No Match Found." Oddly enough, if you say "Dial" followed by the name of one of your contacts, it does work, so there is a bit of inconsistency in the approach that leaves quite a bit of room for user error.

You can also use Voice Control to playback music, but this doesn't work quite as well as the dialing recognition. Saying "Play Guns and Roses" for some reason consistently resulted in a Josh Groban song playing. Saying, more specifically, "Play Appetite for Destruction," resulted eight times out of ten in the iPhone 3GS responding "Playing album Appetite for Destruction" and successfully beginning playback. However, two out of ten times I received false positives. One time the iPhone 3GS responded with "Playing Ani Difranco" which I guess was due to a matching of the A and D sounds at the beginning of the words, but the other time it began playing back Jay Z "Justify my Thug" from the Black Album, which doesn't sound anything like the words "Appetite for Destruction." 

The basic controls of next song, previous song, stop music, pause music, play music, next album, and shuffle all work well. Asking "What song is playing?" or "What album is playing?" results in Voice Over answering you. Playlists seem to match better than randomly requesting songs or albums, most likely because there is a smaller pool of options for Voice Over to choose from (just as your contacts are most likely a smaller pool of possibilities than all the song titles, album titles, and artists in your iPhone's music collection). To play a playlist, you simply say "Play playlist NAME OF PLAYLIST." You can also simply say "Play NAME OF PLAYLIST" but this can result in false matches against the songs and albums on your iPhone 3GS. 

While the Voice Control features of the iPhone 3GS are definitely nice to have, considering that most other mobile phones, whether regular free phones or full-featured smart-phones, have had voice dialing for years, we're not overly amazed that Apple finally managed to get these features in the iPhone 3GS, nor are we impressed by the implementation. Hopefully, Apple will expand upon Voice Over's features over time and various third party developers will work Voice Control support into their applications. I was disappointed that I couldn't simply say "Where am I?" to have my location plotted on the included Maps application. A turn-by-turn GPS application for the iPhone 3GS that plugs into Voice Control will definitely make this feature much more impressive, but right now, it fits more squarely in the "should have been part of all iPhones from the beginning" category.

Compass

  

Figures 4, 5, & 6: Compass, True North / Magnetic North, and directional information in Maps app

The compass, at first glance, appears to be little more than something of interest for campers or Boy Scouts. If you launch the compass, it displays what direction you're pointed in, your coordinates, and can be set to point at either True North or Magnetic North via the preferences that you access by hitting the i button in the bottom right corner. Hitting the location button in the bottom left corner of the Compass app takes you to the Maps app and if you hit the location button again, the icon changes slightly and a V-shaped bit of white overlay appears on the map to show you which direction you are currently facing. This is extremely useful when you're trying to quickly gain your orientation when you're following directions or you've just emerged from a subway stop and you're trying to decipher uptown from downtown.

As with many other features of the iPhone 3GS, we probably won't see the full potential of the built-in compass until more developers start building applications that plug into its power. 

Oleophobic

The screen on the iPhone 3GS is treated with an oleophobic coating which basically means that it should be more resistive to smudges and smears than the screen on the iPhone 3G or the original iPhone. We found it to be just that, more resistant. It isn't entirely resistant, but there is less buildup over time and the smudges and smears that do appear are far easier to wipe off.

Battery life and battery percentages

There's a new option on the iPhone 3GS via which you can turn on an option to display the percentage of battery charge left on the iPhone (as can be seen in all the previous iPhone screenshots accompanying this post). While we found this feature to be immensely useful, we can also imagine people becoming entirely neurotic about this extra bit of metadata, so not everyone will want to turn the feature on. Should you want to turn it on, however, you'll find the Battery Percentage preference as the top option under Settings—>General—>Usage.

Regarding battery life itself on the iPhone 3GS, many people online are claiming that it runs shorter than either the original iPhone or the iPhone 3G. However, in our entirely unscientific, real world testing over the past two weeks, we've found no signs of this. Our 16GB iPhone 3GS under rather regular usage keeps a charge longer than our first generation iPhone did. There are certain activities that will undoubtedly suck the battery dry rather quickly, but we're skeptical of this being a sign that the battery is in anyway worse than the battery in previous iPhones. Rather, we think the battery life is greatly improved, along with the performance and capabilities of the iPhone 3GS, but those very same improved capabilities and performance mean that the iPhone 3GS is being more actively used than its predecessors, and therefore can have the illusion of not performing as well in terms of battery life.

If you're simply using the iPhone as a phone and as a means to check email and occasionally surf the web, you'll find the battery life to be excellent. If you're shooting lots of video and uploading it on-location, as I noted in the first part of this review, you'll experience a quick drain of your battery, but that's not really that abnormal for shooting video on any device. Video is a battery intensive task, as it requires actively using the screen, actively using the camera, and actively writing to the internal memory of your iPhone 3GS. The other activity that will quickly suck down your battery is playing video games on the iPhone 3GS. A few hours of graphic intensive video games on an iPhone 3GS with less than 50% of its charge left will make a nice dent in the battery life.

On most days, I am logged into BeejiveIM for chat and IM+ for Twitter push notifications on my iPhone 3GS all day long. I usually have about 2 to 5 phone calls on the iPhone 3GS of varied length. I read through the New York Times and Wall Street Journal headlines on the device in the morning while I'm having breakfast and drinking coffee and then I begin going through my feeds using Fever on the device. Usually sometime after work and before bed, I'll play a few video games for an hour or more. With that rather rigorous use of the device, I normally find myself plugging the iPhone 3GS in to charge over night with about 30-40% of my battery left. If I find myself playing a bit more video games than normal, it'll be in the 10-20% range.

Despite the improved performance of the battery, we would still rather have a removable battery so that we could carry a spare around with us while on the go.

Heat problems?

I mentioned this in the first section of this review, but the only time when I've noticed my 16GB iPhone 3GS getting warm has been when I am actively shooting video. Even when I play video games or watch videos for a while on the device, it has remained cool to the touch. There have several stories online about people complaining about the iPhone 3GS overheating and Apple even issued a comment about it, but we haven't noticed this tendency with our iPhone 3GS. Either there is some other factor that is making some people's iPhone 3GSs overheat, like a case or consistent usage in overly hot areas, or some units are in some way defective while others, like ours, are not. 

If your iPhone 3GS is always running hot and you notice that it is running out of battery life more quickly than what I've described in the previous section, especially if you are in the first 14 days of iPhone 3GS ownership, I would highly recommend that you go to an Apple Store or contact Apple about the problem and see if they will exchange your iPhone 3GS for a new one. Apple has a long history of first generation devices that included some devices from the same production line suffering from overheating issues while other devices having no problems whatsoever. Apple also has summarily refused in the past to widely admit to any such problems. When the 12-inch Powerbook was initially introduced, mine warped from heat after a few weeks of usage and I took it to an Apple Store, showed them it rocking on a flat surface, spoke to the manager of the store and demanded that they replace it, and they did.

Overall performance

Overall the iPhone 3GS is an amazing device and very versatile. So far, we've had no real problems with the device malfunctioning or not behaving as it should. The iPhone 3GS serves as a good phone with crisper audio than the first generation iPhone and with audio dialing capabilities that previous models should have had. The iPhone 3GS is also a great internet device both thanks to the new iPhone OS 3.0 landscape keyboard and the faster processor, increased memory, and improved handling of JavaScript. The addition of an integrated compass makes the iPhone 3GS perform better as a makeshift GPS unit than the iPhone 3G, although it's still missing integrated turn by turn directions. The iPhone 3GS is also an amazingly powerful gaming machine that should begin to challenge the likes of the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP as more games are designed specifically for the improved graphic capabilities of the iPhone 3GS.

What's missing and what we'd like to see in future models

We've touched on many of these items throughout this two part review, but the main things missing from the iPhone 3GS are: a user-replaceable battery, zoom controls for the camera, support for 720p HD video, improved implementation of the uploading to YouTube video workflow, improved implementation of the Voice Control features that would add control of more aspects of the device, and, one item that we haven't mentioned: Flash support. Like it or not, Adobe Flash is nearly omnipresent online and the lack of support for Flash is the only thing that really keeps the iPhone 3GS from being a viable on-the-go solution that could eliminate the need for lightweight classes of computers like netbooks.

What we'd really like to see is what we conjectured about in the first part of this review. We'd like to see Apple not wait until the next model of the iPhone to improve upon the 3GS, but rather for Apple to release firmware updates for the iPhone 3GS that will unlock the full processing power of the device, unlock the ability to shoot 720p HD video, allow for live video streaming direct to online sites that support it, add Flash support to Mobile Safari, and improve the workflow and performance of all the great new features that the iPhone 3GS has to offer.

Obsessable Recommendation

If you have a first generation iPhone and are free to upgrade to the iPhone 3GS 16GB at $199 or the 32GB model at $299, and have been thinking about doing so, but wanted to wait until the initial purchasers of the device had time to find out what all was wrong, then we recommend you go ahead and upgrade to the iPhone 3GS. If you're the owner of an iPhone 3G, then the choice is going to be more difficult for you, as you'll only really need the iPhone 3GS if the new features focused on in our review are must have killer features for you. 

If you are a first-time iPhone buyer and you're wondering whether to spend $99 on an 8GB iPhone 3G or $199 on a 16GB iPhone 3GS, Obsessable recommends that you go the 3GS route if you can afford it. The increased performance, space, and feature set of the iPhone 3GS makes that extra $100 money that is clearly well spent.

If you're still under contract with AT&T and the iPhone 3GS will cost you more than the $199 or $299 price points, then just wait until you're no longer restricted by your contract and there is a new model. Just keep in mind that the new model may be the same old iPhone 3GS with some special unlocking of the underutilized power under the hood.

Obsessable Rating: 9 out of 10