Well, I just had to get the new iPhone 3G S. I’ve been an iPhone fanatic since the original came out 2 years ago. Last year, I upgraded to a 16 GB 3G and loved it. The GPS feature has been great. Well, when I heard that the 3G S has a 3 megapixel camera AND a video camera, along with a real compass, I just had to have one. In addition, the 3G S is supposed to be 2X faster than the 3G.

I normally do not pre-order things but this time I did. AT&T promised overnight delivery shipped the day before the official release date. Today is the day! The phone arrived this morning and 30 minutes later, I had transferred all of my “stuff” and was on the net. That was very easy. Now that I’ve had the phone for a few hours I can say, “Wow!”. It really is faster than my 3G. Everything loads so much faster – email, web pages, apps start up faster.

The new features in OS 3 are also nice – I had updated to it on Wednesday when it became available. First there is sideways text entry in Mail, Notes, and Messages – the keyboard flips to the landscape orientation when you rotate the phone. Nice feature, makes typing even easier. Then there is Copy, Cut & Paste! The real thing! The UI is very well done – not an easy task for a handheld device with a touchscreen.

That stuff is nice but get this – Voice Control! It can dial phone numbers, look up names in Address Book, and play music music by saying the artist’s name, a playlist, and even control the songs playing – and it can tell you what song is playing. And, it works amazingly well! The voice dialing alone is worth its weight in electrons! Then we have Compass – it basically turns your $299 iPhone in to a $20 compass. But it is pretty and it works really well. It can tell you exactly which way you are facing. Goggle Maps is compass aware too, when you tap the location icon a 2nd time, Google Maps rotates as you move around! I can’t even tell you how cool this is!

Ok, but it keeps getting better! There is a new Spotlight application built in to search for things on the phone. You get to it by flicking left from the main page. If you look at the little page icons at the bottom of the home pages, the one on the far left is the Spotlight magnifying glass icon. Nicely done! And there is now a built in Voice Memo application that records audio and then lets you share it or email it. I make audio notes to myself all the time in QuickVoice but I’ll try the new Apple recorder.

There are a number of other enhancements too – Stocks has a new graphing mode, updates to Calendar, Find my iPhone shows you where your phone is and Wipe lets you wipe it clean – all from MobileMe. There is also built-in support for the Nike iPod sensor. Internet Tethering and MMS  are built in to OS 3 but not supported by AT&T yet. MMS is promised for late summer, tethering is not mentioned by AT&T.

And now we get to the new camera and video camera! The camera is MUCH better than the original. At 3 megapixels, it is actually usable and it has a new autofocus feature with a really cool manual focus feature. Simply touch an object on the camera preview and iPhone focuses on that object! Including exposure and white balance. This is a very neat feature, I won’t be surprised if some digital camera companies steal this idea – it’s that good! Video is also very usable. 30FPS VGA recording when the phone is held horizontally (wide screen mode). And, it has built-in video editing! How cool is that! The editor is a simple “clip” editor but it is simple to use and nicely implemented. Video can be shared or emailed right from the Camera application too. The camera is much faster too, so you can capture sequences of photos.

The iPhone 3G S is a winner! Not revolutionary but a great evolution from the original iPhone and iPhone 3G!

The way it works is quite easy, when you attempt to connect to the Web in a Hotspot (with Wifi enabled of course), an AT&T page asks for your iPhone’s telephone #. A few seconds later, you get an SMS message with a link to click to enable your access at that Hotspot. Took all of 15 seconds for the entire sequence.

I give AT&T a lot of credit for taking this big step to support their iPhone customer base.

Free Apps

• AIM – instant messaging client for AOL and Apple’s iChat
• AOL Radio – reviewed yesterday BoxOffice – find out what movies are playing and buy tickets
• eBay Mobile – find, bid and buy stuff on eBay
• Facebook – reviewed yesterday
• Google Mobile App – Google desktop for the iPhone
• NetNewsWire – an RSS reader for iPhone
• Remote – control your iTunes or AppleTV from your iPhone
• Twinkle – geotagged twitter
• Weatherbug – displays weather along with radar maps and webcams from your location

Purchased Apps

• AccuFuel ($.99) – keep track of gas milage and cost for multiple vehicles
• Chopper ($7.99) – reviewed yesterday
• Dot Game ($1.99) – play a game of dots anywhere
• G-Spot ($1.99) – position sharing
• NetSketch ($5.99) – network aware sketch pad (very cool)
• QuickVoice ($1.99) – audio recorder
• Starmap ($11.99) – great for all of us amateur astronomers!

Next up is Chopper – a very addictive action game. I am not a big video game fan (actually, I am a recovered Gameaholic from the early 80s) but it is good to have a game or 2 ready to fill in a boring wait or keep the kids occupied. This game is relatively simple – guide a helicopter by tilting the iPhone to make it ascend/descend and move forward/backward and hover. There are 60 missions (levels) to complete. The basic idea is to rescue little people while avoiding missiles and bazooka fire. Enimies can be crushed by landing on them! Fun, and addicting.

If you are a Facebook fan – like me – then you will really like the iPhone Facebook app version 1.1. Sure, the Facebook Webapp has been around for a while but this dedicated app has some great features and is fast. Some differences from the Webapp are: it supports Facebook chat, it is integrated with the camera and photo album on your iPhone so you can take a photo and immediately share it right from Facebook, you can alos write on your friends’ walls, and the coolest feature – photo tags are displayed when you touch a friend’s photo! This 1.1 update is siginifacntly more stable than the first version too. DId I mention it is free?

And let’s not forget the WordPress app! This little gem finally takes blogging on the road. You can use this free app to edit and create new posts on WordPress.com blogs or your own installations of WordPress. It supports multiple blogs too. A nice feature is its camera and photo album integration. Not a bad 1.0 product!

Now, compare that to my iPhone 3G experience.

I walked in to my other local Apple Store in the Rockingham Mall where there was a line of 7 people in front of me before the store opened. “No problem” thought I, there should be plenty of phones so it should only take a few minutes.” Boy was I wrong. I timed an average of 20 minutes for each transaction. 4 of them had some sort of activation issue that required calling ATT – myself included. After waiting for 45 minutes, I stepped up to the plate. Got my 3G upgrade for myself and that took 5 minutes. “Cool” I thought. Then it was time to buy an iPhone 3G 8GB for my son and add a new line to my ATT Family Plan. That is where the hassle started. Firstly, the Apple system rejected my line addition so the salesguy had to call ATT. ATT could not locate my record – even with my cell #, billing address and zip code. The lady at ATT could not find my town in MA! I assured her that I lived there with about 10,000 other residents. After 30 minutes, she finally found my record and proceeded to add the line. 20 minutes later, the transaction was complete. The salesguy asked if I wanted him to activate the phones. I asked if I could do it at home, myself, since I had been at the store for 2 hrs and really needed to get back to work. He let me leave the store unactivated.\

At home, I was able to activate the upgrade to my phone with no issues. The new iPhone on the new line was a different story. The voice service activated but the data service did not. I logged in to my ATT Cellular account and saw that the new line was configured with the original iPhone $20 data plan with 200 text messages. I then noticed that my Unlimited Messaging Family Plan was missing from my account. I called ATT. Basically, the activation of the new phone caused a conflict resulting in my messaging plan being canceled! The ATT rep fixed that but could not fix the data issue on the phone. I need to go back to an Apple store or ATT company store to fix that.

Stay tuned…

1) Mobile device manufacturers are keeping tight controls on application development on their platforms

With the exception of Apple’s iPhone and the future possibility of Google’s Android, developers have to jump through hoops and pay for the privilege of developing on the platform. Talk about stifling innovation! These same mobile device manufacturers have not put any significant effort in to improving their Web browsers – the technology that can either make or break the “Mobile Web”. If the mobile browser is inadequate, the mobile browsing experience will suffer and users will not flock to the web. If these platforms were developer friendlier, innovation on the browser would have started sooner. The Mobile Firefox project could provide some relief.

2) The mobile carriers are gouging the market with high cost data services

With the high cost of data services (upwards of $35/month), only hard core technophiles and those with corporate expense accounts can afford/justify it. Think about how ridiculous .25 an SMS message or $10/month for unlimited text messaging is! Text Messaging – the stuff you do for free on IM on your laptop! And with the pitiful browsing support on most handsets, the Mobile Web is not going to drive users to subscribe. The folks at RIM have at least got email “right” and that does indeed drive a lot of corporate usage.

Have the device manufacturers and carriers killed the Mobile Web? I don’t think, so but they have kept it languishing for a long time. Back in 1999, the wireless Palm VII offered the first glimmer of how powerful and simple the Mobile Web could be. The service was $15/month (for the base limited page view service) and special “Web Clipping” apps were required (and there was no fee to develop them). But you know what, they worked really well and a lot of companies jumped on the “PQA” (Palm Query Application) bandwagon. I bought a lot of books from Amazon using the Amazon PQA and finding the nearest Starbucks was dead simple. Without GPS, the Palm VII could locate you based on the cell network – this was in 1999! How cool is that? I finally have this capability again on my iPhone.

I see a change in the tide coming. Firstly, the iPhone is truly spectacular. It tears down the barriers of a closed system – which will allow real unimpeded innovation. It provides an amazing Web browser, the Mobile Safari browser. Granted, Mobile Safari has some limitations in its first release but, wow, what an amazing browser it is. The touch interface is superb and the resolution and colors are spectacular.

Secondly, the carriers are starting to see competitive pricing pressure. Sprint recently announced their Simply Everything Plan that gives unlimited everything – voice, SMS, email, Web browsing, GPS, picture and video messaging – for $99.99/month. Still a big premium to pay but a step in the right direction. Even the iPhone rate plans are attempting to reduce the cost of unlimited data services.

So, what does all this mean? If you’ve ever used a Palm VII, Blackberry or, especially, an iPhone, you know how convenient and powerful mobile Web, email and data services done “right” can be. The iPhone is mere weeks away from ripping down the walls that have held in innovation for too long, Android will (hopefully) follow within a year. We are not hearing the last gasps of the Mobile Web, rather, I am reminded of that scene at the end of Braveheart when William Wallace takes in a breath of air and clearly yells … “FREEDOM”!