The iPhone 3GS: The greatest hand-held multi-utility gadget ever?

I remember receiving the iPhone back in 2008, a few months after it was launched with great hype in the US on June 30^th,2007. It was a beauty, slick, slim and with a touch interface(!!!). I turned it on, and a beautiful screen said “slide to unlock” and there the problem started. It needed to bejailbroken. And instead of a Dominos “I’m  loving it”, out came a “What the hell, a $400 phone!!!I’m  screwed!!!” But before we go into my story, a little history:

Let me remind you that this was a device whose predecessor was the Moto ROKR. Atleast that was what the joint efforts (or bickering) of Cingular, Motorola and Apple had produced. The fiercely independent Steve Jobs waned to make a phone that would annihilate competition, which is what the Palm Treo 600, various 3G capable phones and iTunes rivaling online stores represented. The competition to the iPod was severe, and in the future that Jobs envisaged, 1 device would perform the functions of an iPod, a phone and a PDA, and it woud do the job in a much slicker, faster manner as compared to the competition. The result was a 4.8 ounce beauty of aluminium and glass.

But it was not all roses along the way. The touch interface that the iPod used was too simple for the iPhone. The hard plastic used for its screen would have to be replaced by glass. The OS needed to be totally new, a stripped down and redesigned version of the OSX capable of running on the ARM processor chips. Apple’s hardware and software geeks put days and nights of effort to create the then iPhone, while their head eked out a historic deal with AT&T with slices of revenue from iPhone user bills, almost $80 a phone profits and in the process, broke the carrier owners stranglehold on phone design. For the first time, other makers rushed to build phones that would keep business with other carriers.

But this career-association of the iPhone has been its Achilles heel. The deal brought almost 3 million new users to AT&T. In America, that’s fine because most phone users have contracts. But in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, this was irking. Vodaphone in India launched the iPhone at 36,000 bucks!!! More than half of that colossal amount was unjustified. What followed was a wave of jailbreaking, as a SDK for the iPhone did not exist then and carrier locking was a pain in the arse.

Thus was it that I came to own an iPhone, purchased in Spain and jailbroken by me. Hell, I was disappointed with the thing.

A stupid camera, no video recording, no mms, no sms forwarding, no group sms, a virus for the iPhone which turned it off(!!!),if this was the future, it was the porn star of phones, a pretty face with a good bod, screams a lot but no substance and no one to use the performance. Then started the OS upgrades and finally an SDK, a 3G version, and all was quite well, but the iPhone still lacked something.

Enter the iPhone 3GS. This is the ultimate, true dream machine. Here are the specs of Apple’s website:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3gs/

and a comparison with the 3GS:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/compare-iphones/

Tech details, quoting verbatim from the AnandTech website article: http://anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3579&p=1

Basically, it’s2x faster than the 3G,a gaming machine thanks to the and faster due to the new ARM processor chip. Quoting AnandTech,” As I mentioned earlier, the Palm Pre uses a similar combination of hardware to what I expect from the iPhone 3GS. TI’s OMAP 3430 combines a Cortex A8 CPU core with a PowerVR SGX 530 GPU. The difference is that while the Pre uses its excess horsepower to enable user-level application multitasking, Apple won’t be. The Pre is most definitely faster than the iPhone, but it still has some rough edges. Combine the power of the Pre with the highly optimized software stack of the iPhone and you’ve got the recipe of an extremely fast iPhone. While I’ve yet to play with one, on paper, the 3GS should be every bit as fast as the videos make it seem.”

And a video camera 3mp, tap to focus, copy paste, voice commands, mms and loads of apps!!!

The closest competition is the Palm Pre, and honestly, it’s fast and capable, but it’s not an iPhone.

Here are the details of the Pre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Pre,

http://palm.com/pre

The future holds multi-core palm PC processors and more efficient CPU utilization algorithms. But till

then, the iPhone 3GS is officially king of all handhelds.

And at $99 for the iPhone 3G and $199 for the 3GS starts, the only thing that is holding me back from

getting one is the carrier associated locking. Although you can get factory unlocked iPhones from lots of countries (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=499808, http://daringfireball.net/2008/09/unlocked_iphones_in_hong_kong), you have to pay a charge to cancel the contract. And that charge is hefty. The only country, officially, where you can order an iPhone from the Apple online store is Hong Kong. Then again, they don’t ship overseas, because this strategy is to capture the huge Chinese market. Although the 3GS can be jailbroken (http://www.macworld.com/article/141417/iphone3gs_jailbreak.html), I wouldn’t jeopardize my warranty. So I guess until I visit Hong Kong, I can only pray that Apple gets some sense into its head or Vodafone lowers its charges in India.

PS: There is an article on Wired magazine about the iPhone’s history

http://www.wired.com/print/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_iphone

29^th June,2009