FedEx delivered my 16GB white iPhone 3G S this afternoon and I have had a few hours to play with it, so I thought I'd put together a first impressions post as a preface for an upcoming full review. In the picture above you can see the iPhone 3G S laying amidst the sprawl of its unboxed glory. It comes with the standard Apple stickers, earphones, USB cord, and AC plug adapter. Coming from a first generation 4GB iPhone, I have to say that the iPhone 3G S is insanely fast across the board. Applications, even animation heavy video games, launch very quickly and run nicely without any of the lag that I had become used to dealing with on my first generation iPhone.

Besides the added speed, the additional storage space is really nice. Setting up the iPhone 3G S went rather flawlessly, although I did have to click through about five different Apple and AT&T Terms of Service agreements. The first sync took forever, but that's largely because I selected to just sync everything I had in iTunes over to the iPhone 3G S. 

I've taken some pictures with the new camera and the touch to focus controls are definitely cool. I also shot the following video to give you an idea of the quality you can expect from the device if you shoot video and upload directly to YouTube (Note: the quality of both of the videos in this post will most likely improve after they've been up on YouTube for a while, so check back):

Uploading this video directly from the iPhone to YouTube failed a few times. At first, I thought it was failing because I was attempting to upload the video over the 3G connection, but even after I connected to my WiFi network, the upload failed once. Also, when I received a phone call in the middle of prepping the upload, I was returned to my photo albums, rather than returned to the YouTube information screen for uploading, which was a bit of a hassle and bad workflow design. It seems that if the iPhone is allowed to go to sleep or do anything else during a video upload, the video upload fails. It's not unexpected, but it's far from ideal. A background upload or pausing the upload would be far better. Also, when the upload fails, you are presented with a "Uploading failed" message and an "Okay" button. Apple really needs to add a "try again" button to save people the time of re-compressing the video and going through all the upload steps again.

Here's the same video uploaded directly from my computer after syncing the iPhone 3G S (and therefore bypassing the in-phone video compression):

I also shot just a few test pictures with the iPhone 3G S. This first one is focusing on my pet parrot, Sonja (the red one):

And this second shot is focusing on my pet parrot, Misha (the green one):

This was in a not very well lit room and with very vibrantly colored birds (and my shaky hands), so I would count these as early preliminary results at this point and wouldn't want to draw any hard and fast judgments about the camera capabilities of the iPhone 3G S based on these.

I also played with the compass application a bit, which lets you choose between True North and Magnetic North, and I received one odd message asking me to turn off and then back on my iPhone 3G S, and I'm not sure what that was all about.

  

So far, I'm really enjoying the iPhone 3G S. I can definitely tell that the new smudge resistant screen is picking up less smudges and is easier to clean than the screen of any other iPhone I've ever used. I'll have a more detailed review after the weekend once I've had some time to seriously explore the device.