iPhone 3GS – Day 1 Impressions – Speed Demon
So my wait for the new iPhone 3GS was over earlier today, and I ‘ve had a few hours to play with it now, and form some early Day 1 impressions of it. If I had to sum it up in just a few words, I ‘d need only two: Speed Demon.
It really is substantially faster, way faster, and at everything I ‘ve tried so far, not just in certain places. I ‘ve got a short set of speed test numbers comparing my iPhone 3G to the 3GS listed below “ just a few I was able to do before the 3G had to go to work with the wife.
Speed Demon
These are just a few little tests I did quickly this morning to see how fast the new 3GS is compared to the iPhone 3G in carrying out some common actions:
Open the full New York Times home page (time until the blue in the status bar gets all the way across and page is static):
Test Action | iPhone 3G Result | iPhone 3GS Result |
| Load full New York Times front page in Safari over a 3G network connection | 44 seconds | 14 seconds |
| Load full New York Times front page over a WiFi connection | 39 seconds | 12 seconds |
| Load everythingiCafe iPhone light page | 10 seconds | 3 seconds |
| Launch App Store & wait until it stops saying ‘Loading ‘ | 19 seconds | 4 seconds |
| Launch Twitterrific & await full refresh of main timeline | 20 seconds | 5 seconds |
| Open Tweetie & await full refresh of main timeline | 17 seconds | 4 seconds |
| Take new pic with Camera app & await saved thumbnail completion | 3 seconds | 2 seconds |
| Open AP Mobile News app & await full front page load | 22 seconds | 8 seconds |
That ‘s all the tests I had time for earlier “ will do some more over the weekend, but in the meantime I can also say that the 3GS just feels ‘blazing ‘ in nearly every sort of action I ‘ve tried it out with so far. Apps launch much quicker, page loads in Safari (as seen above) are way quicker, everything just feels considerably zippier. Even restarts of the iPhone feel quite a bit quicker.
Other Day 1 Thoughts / Impressions:
The 3GS feels a little touch heavier / solider in the hand than the 3G, as expected, since it is just a tiny bit heavier than its predecessor.
There;s nothing much to report in terms of 3GS box contents “ they are minimal. You get a power plug-in, a sync / charge cable, headphones, and the slim ‘Getting Started ‘ type guide, and that ‘s about it.
The boxes are still handsome and near identical to the 3G ones:
The new camera “ and especially the autofocus feature “ are very cool. Video recording is easy to do and the videos land in your Camera Roll “ from where you can share them via email or directly to YouTube.
Voice Control is one of the features I ‘ve most been looking forward to. I ‘m very glad to see it and it mostly works well, but I ‘m a little disappointed at the limited range of commands it supports right now. Its abilities cover making calls and controlling music on the iPod app (not Last.fm or others).
Way back in the day when I used Voice Command on Windows Mobile, you could launch applications, pull up a contact ‘s details, interact with your calendar and more. I would definitely like to be able to use Voice Control to launch apps, to search with Spotlight, and to interact with contacts and calendar items. I hope this area will see updates soon.
Those are some of my quick Day 1 impressions. What are yours? How are you finding the new 3GS so far? I ‘d also love to hear whether you are finding similar speed increases.
Really loving the 3gs.It's way faster than my 3g. Safari browsing over wifi feels just like your on a computer now
Peteo – cool – glad to hear you're liking the speed as well.
Just got mine set up after having an iPhone 2g for the past year. A world of difference!
Great stuff – the performance improvement for V1 owners has to feel just huge.
That's one slow as hell iphone 3g. I bet if you restore it, things would go quicker.
The 3G has been restored not long ago during while using 3.0 Beta 5.
TC – I have atually found that the 3g OS makes my 2g phone much faster. My wife's pages are loading much slower…haven't upgraded her's yet.
Glad OS 3.0 is treating you well.
Hell yeah!!! Speed it is! I am so impressed by the speed! I almost gave up on TweetDeck for iPhone when I was still on 2.2 because it was just too slooow and crashing all the time. On 3.0, TweetDeck is lightning fast. Safari on 3G is also great. I don't really like the voice command thing though. By the time you push 2 seconds on the home button, start saying what you want, and actually have it work, you're better off doing it "manually" on the phone. Besides, I don't think voice command likes my thick French accent…
LOL – Voice Control has misunderstood my mongrel (half brit / half american) accent several times as well.
Interesting, so every quick-test you performed, with exception, was testing the speed at which a web page or web application loaded? The exception being the camera test (proprietary application), where a one (1) second difference was reported between the 3G and 3Gs. Please correct me if I am wrong, but does not the majority of your 'speed tests' have more to do with wifi/3G data transfer rate/throughput than the hardware specs of each model? You say it 'feels' faster, but only offer up comparisions that are entirey contingent upon outside variables.
Then again, maybe I just need to sit back, shut up, keep reading, and see how all this hashes out in the next few weeks, huh? I think old age is making me more and more synical…
Regardless of my nitpicking, keep up the good work, Patrick!
Martin – actually the App Store is local app (a built in one) – and the performance increase in loading it is huge. Also, Twitterrific, Tweetie, and AP Mobile are all local apps, not web apps, though they are pulling web-based content. I think the point is native apps – when pulling some web-based contents or other content types – are rendering graphics and pages much, much more quickly than on the 3G.
I don't believe the majority of even my very non-comprehensive little tests reflect faster WiFi / 3G network speeds – WiFi tests were all done on my home WiFi network, which has certainly not improved in speed of late.
The page loading / rendering etc improvements – IMO – are almost certainly the result of having a much faster processor in the 3GS.
Thanks very much for the kind words as well Martin!
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