We ditched our newbie Nokia for three weeks to adopt the much-awaited and very cool iPhone 3GS. Here's the good, bad and the ugly
We ditched our newbie Nokia for three weeks to adopt the much-awaited and very cool iPhone 3GS. Here's the good, bad and the ugly
What: iPhone 3GS
For how much: Rs 35,500 (16GB), Rs 41,500 (32GB)
Worth it? Depends
Speed. That was Apple's big promise for the 3GS. And boy, have they delivered. Even though it looks exactly like its predecessor (the 3G), this baby is different thanks to the 'S'; it means exactly what it stands for ufffd speed. Quicker loading and better frame rates while gaming and opening applications or loading music, is a huge bonus. Everything is snappier.
Get click-happy
A 1MP improvement may not seem like much on paper, but in practice, it means an overall bump in picture quality. The natty 'tap to focus' feature works well to shift focus. What's not cool is the absence of zoom and flash, which even rudimentary camera phones have these days. Baffling.u00a0 
Video recording and editing
Finally! Does it disappoint? Yes and no. Daytime videos are clear, but night quality leaves much to be desired. It is a VGA camera after all. Editing can be done right in the video window. Simply grab the start and end handles to crop what you want to leave out, then tap to email or upload to YouTube. It can't all be good, though; there's no way to save the original clip once you've edited it. A big miss.
Messaging and landscape QWERTY
You wonder how you ever managed without this once you've used it. The 3GS flexes some serious muscle. Typing errors are noticeably fewer; a boon for anyone with long nails or fat fingers. You can now forward messages and send business cards. Strangely, you still can't receive business cards or message delivery reports; the kind of oversight that makes you want to punch someone. Messages grouped together as chats look delicious and make life simpler. But MMS is operator-dependent, you can't save messages as drafts or into folders, and there's no character counting. That means you have no idea how many texts you've spilled into. Basics that really ought to have been included.
Cut, copy, paste
This one is an absolute killer on the 3GS. Seamlessly integrated into both, messaging and browsing, cut-copy-paste is now simpler than saying 'cheese!'. Apart from being able to grab and copy bits of text, you can now select whole chunks of matter from a web page, including pictures, and simply drop-paste them with all the formatting intact. It makes you want to jump for joy. To undo something, just shake. Very cute.u00a0
Spotlight search
Access it with one snappy scroll to the left of the main screen for one-stop-shop search access for everything from contacts to songs, notes, email, and calendar events. Just type, and results show up almost immediately. We appreciate it.
Voice Control
You are driving, and you want to call Julie. Long press the homescreen button and say "Call Julie". Don't be surprised when the 3GS says, "Playing songs by Britney Spears." Seriously, it's that off the mark. In the three weeks that we test drove the Voice Control, not once did it manage to get the commands right. This, after trying out various intonations, distances from the speaker phone, and what-not. Imagine the results with a lovely Indian name like Vaidehi. Shudder.
So, should you get it?
It's an iPhone, after all. Still, do you want to shell out a mini-fortune for a phone that misses some basic functionalities, doesn't support Adobe Flash and still doesn't support multitasking (even to transfer data to another iPhone, you need to use iTunes because there's no Bluetooth); but is very cool? Your call.u00a0
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