Initial Take On iPhone 3GS

Today was pretty exciting as far as Apple news goes with the announcement of the release of Mac OS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard', new MacBooks, MacBook Air price reductions, iPhone OS 3.0, and yes, the iPhone 3GS.  Most rumors actually turned out to be correct, such as MMS, a 3 megapixel auto-focus camera, tethering, magnometer, and video recording.  Some that didn't pan out were the new matte finish (instead of a glossy back), but the most happed for, but more far-fetched non-event was the forward facing video lens.  Others that I didn't find anywhere on the rumor sites included the Voice Control feature.  Gizmodo posted a hands-on review of that feature and found it easily befuddled by background noise.  It's forgivable because I'm not sure how much I will use that feature anyway.

Why is this finally going to be model I buy into?  Hands down its the speed.  One of the things I find irritating about the iPhone's little brother, the iPod Touch, is that it takes an enormous amount of processing power to render some sites I frequent, such as Slashdot.  Their discussion threads can take an aweful amount of time to load, and in some instances, cause Safari to outright crash.  With some more muscle under the hood, I should be able to run through text and javascript heavy sites that make previous versions of the Apple software want to cry.

More than that though are the staples of desktop computing: copy and paste.  This is another realm where I'd do more mobile blogging if I could easily copy/paste links and quotes into my blogging platform.  This will make things much easier to do.

On top of that, throw in the three megapixel camera and I feel like I have a replacement for my point and shoot camera.  My three year old destroyed our DSLR substitute by trying to mash the lens back into the body of the two hundred dollar camera.  With no external parts to do so, making the iPhone 3GS the new small portable camera makes a natural fit.

In the end I think this was a great, if not incremental refresh to an already good product, and with with this announcement they've found a new customer who has run out of excuses.  June 19th, here we come.