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New iphone with its features and review

The new Iphone which is released yesterday is faster than others but found some lackings.
Here is a nice post which I found in .sfgate.com.

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Sometimes I actually wonder if people realise when they are being manipulated or whether they just passively live their lives without feeling that it can actually be quite depressing to become addicted to the products of a single company regardless of quality.

I gushed about the iPhone when it appeared last year, waxing on about its ease of use and its ability to draw people in with its intuitive and beguiling touch-screen interface.

But it had its limitations and flaws, and the phone was in essence a very good first effort for a company with no history in cell phones. A little over a year later, the iPhone 3G shows that Apple has learned and built on what many felt was still the best smart phone available.

The most glaring problem with the first iPhone was the slow data speed, because it ran on AT&T’s Edge network. The iPhone 3G is named for the faster 3G network that powers most of the top phones these days, offering DSL-like speeds that are not tied to a Wi-Fi hotspot.

With 3G access, the latest iPhone pulls up Web sites much faster and cuts the load time for YouTube videos in half. Sitting in the AT&T store in downtown San Francisco, I was able to get speeds of between 200 and 500 Kbps, slower than what AT&T says is the average for its 3G network, but much faster than Edge, which topped out at about 100 Kbps.

Another improvement is the inclusion of a Global Positioning System chip. With GPS, you can do Google map searches for restaurants, bars or post offices, and the map will deliver results based on your location - no more entering where you are or relying on cell towers to find your general location. You can also use the GPS chip to geo-tag photos and get directions, though the chip is not precise enough to deliver turn-by-turn navigation.

Those are two of the biggest and necessary hardware changes to the iPhone, which looks similar to its predecessor. The dimensions remain almost the same, although the phone has a slightly curved plastic back that is more comfortable to hold than the original iPhone.

Apple has learned to get in line with the cellular industry’s way of charging customers. Instead of the $499 and $599 prices of the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G sells for $199 for 8 GB and $299 for 16 GB.

The iPhone 3G, however, has higher data fees, which push the cost of ownership higher over a two-year contract to more than the iPhone.

Apple has also learned that a smart phone needs to offer more to business customers, who make up the user base. The iPhone 3G offers Microsoft Exchange support for e-mail, contacts and calendars for another $15 a month for Microsoft’s ActiveSync.

The Exchange support is part of the iPhone 2.0 update released Friday for all iPhones and iPod Touches. The update includes Apple’s $99-a-year MobileMe online e-mail, calendar, contacts and file service, a successor to its .Mac service. In addition to international language support and better e-mail and contact management, the new software also includes access to Apple’s App Store, which has more than 600 paid and free downloadable applications.

This is where Apple’s history as a computer and software company shines. By opening up the iPhone and encouraging developers to write programs, Apple is turning the phone into a true computer that can support a wealth of applications. And by collecting the software in one easy-to-find store, it encourages people to buy applications, both serious and trivial.

Other smart phone platforms offer many more applications, but no one’s made it this easy to explore and download apps. It’s why I expect this store to grow rapidly in the coming months as developers eye the opportunities to make money from iPhone programs.

The apps range from the free downloadable versions of the New York Times, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to engaging games, productivity tools, business apps and music software that help you discover or create music. I played with Band, a simple $10 tool that lets you create and record multi-tracked music using different instruments. Another fun application is Enigmo, a puzzle game that requires you to divert the course of falling water droplets.

Both titles show why the iPhone is such a potent platform. The apps could be replicated elsewhere, but it’s the iPhone’s large multi-touch screen that allows them to come alive.

No doubt, software will be key to the success of the iPhone 3G, and perhaps address some of the shortcomings I still see in the device.

Developers, Apple or otherwise, should be able to tackle the lack of picture messaging, voice dialing, video recording and cut-and-paste tools that are missing from the iPhone 3G. I’m particularly disappointed in its lack of video recording and voice dialing, which is especially helpful now that California’s hands-free law is in effect. These are things that most cell phone manufacturers wouldn’t dare leave out.

But as I said, Apple is relatively new to the cell phone game. That said, after seeing what it’s done in two iterations of iPhones, it’s scary to think where it will be even a year from now.

Stumble it!