Apple's iPhone has transformed how the world thinks of cellphones. Phone companies and hardware-makers follows the iPhone's touchscreen interface, easy access to the Internet, and bustling App Store. The S is for "speed"
The iPhone 3G S is a major step forward in terms of the iPhone's technological underpinnings. Its processor runs at 600 MHz, compared to previous models' 412MHz. It's got 256MB of RAM, compared to 128MB in previous models. The lack of external changes belie what's going on underneath the iPhone 3G S's glass and plastic exterior. The iPhone's last upgrade added a faster cellular radio and a GPS chip, but otherwise, the iPhone 3G's internals were largely unchanged from the original iPhone.
From inside, the iPhone 3GS has been fully redesigned, with new core components (CPU, memory, integrated compass, video recorder) in different locations, no less. And together with the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade (which makes many compelling features available to existing iPhone customers), the iPhone 3GS stands tall. After pounding on it, you will find that at the full-subsidy prices, the 3GS is a surprisingly worthy upgrade for heavy users of the phone's Web and gaming capabilities, and for general-use apps--even if you're only jumping from the iPhone 3G. Not only do apps open faster, they respond faster, too.
Apple claims the battery's talk time over 3G should be about the same as with iPhone 3G (5 hours), and more than twice that (12 hours) over EDGE. For data, the company rates the battery at up to 9 hours time over Wi-Fi, and 5 hours over 3G.
One pleasant battery-related addition is a new Battery Status indicator, which you enable In General/Usage. It often left one wondering aloud why earlier iterations of iPhone couldn't do this seemingly basic task?
The iPhone 3G S boots faster than any other iPhone OS-based device, and launched every app in record time. Its Safari browser had the dramatically fastest JavaScript engine as measured by the SunSpider benchmark, and loaded Web pages dramatically faster as well. Every aspect of using the phone felt noticeably faster on the iPhone 3G S than on the iPhone 3G. Even actions that only took moments before now happen instantaneously.
The speed doesn't stop with app launches and fast-loading Web pages, either. The iPhone 3G S supports the new OpenGL ES 2.0 standard, meaning that a slew of iPhone game apps will be able to capitalize on advanced graphics features to create higher-quality graphics than have been seen on the iPhone up to now. But more important, the iPhone 3G S is just better when it comes to graphics.
The 3GS so far has generated very strong sales figures, as Apple says that it has sold more than one million 3GS models since its release on Friday. iphone is a significant improvement over the original iPhone 3G in terms of processing power, storage, memory and battery life.
