iPhone OS 3.0 and iPhone 3GS observations, continued
Sunday, 28 June, 2009 — apple iphone
Last week, I posted some few initial observations of the iPhone 3.0 OS and my new iPhone 3GS. I kept additional notes during the week of my subsequent impressions. Here they are:
- MobileSafari gets tripped-up when there are eight pages open and another application tries to open a new page. The oldest page gets replaced.
- I upgraded from a first generation iPhone and the volume level on the phone is much louder during calls.
- The landscape keyboard makes two thumb typing far more realistic, but my thumbs need to build some muscle memory in doing so.
- Marker Felt in Notes is still suboptimal. It feels like writing a nice resume in Comic Sans.
- I’m still not looking at the phone as a serious writing environment. Anything more than a paragraph or so and I’m going to use my laptop.
- I know the Palm Pre supports multitasking. Apart from Pandora, I’m OK with the iPhone being a single-tasking environment. I will deliberately use my iPhone to not have multiple apps competing for partial attention.1
- More than with my initial iPhone, I see the iPhone as a context shifting device. Using my laptop may mean work or at least numerous different tasks while the iPhone means a solid block of reading.
- Instapaper is an excellent way to read articles offline. My own habit is to open links galore from Twitter during the day, send them to Instapaper and read later. The newly-updated Instapaper Pro iPhone app (App Store link) is faster and updates continuously when there’s a network, which makes keeping in sync much easier.
- I’m very pleased with the camera. It’s not an SLR, but I’m far more likely to it with me than my D300. It’s good enough where I don’t care to carry a separate point-and-shoot.
- While the camera has the touch to focus and set exposure, the iPhone still tends to over-expose highlights. However, bringing the photos into Aperture, I can recover some of the highlights for a useful image.
- I have a small, but growing set of photos from the iPhone on Flickr.
- Flickr can accept video emailed directly from the iPhone, but there is a known bug with video shot in portrait orientation.
- iPhone gaming is very good. I purchased iFighter (App Store link) Saturday and spent a couple of hours playing. It reminds me strongly of 1943, and can be used strictly via accelerometer. An easy way to alleviate a sense of not wanting to read, code or edit photos. I certainly got more entertainment value out of that $1 than might have trying 1943 at an arcade.
- This is strictly personal preference. I’m sure there are quite a few Pre users thrilled with the ability to run multiple apps simultaneously.