I ‘ve been a happy owner of an iPhone 3GS for two weeks now. Two weeks and around 3 hours, but who ‘s counting. :) One of the biggest things I ‘ve noticed (continually) in my first couple weeks with the new model is how absolutely rock solid it is, and how well it is utilizing and managing all that lovely 256MB of program memory (RAM) it ‘s got.
We ‘ve been told that the ‘S ‘ in 3GS stands for speed “ and I ‘ve certainly seen constant evidence of that too. The 3GS blazes in just about everything it does. But, to my mind the S could just as easily stand for Solid, or Stable “ although I realize those words are not anywhere near as exciting as ‘speed ‘.
Fair enough then “ solid, stable, even reliable “ are not sexy, exciting words. But they indicate virtues that are so, so welcome on a smartphone as powerful as the iPhone 3GS, one that I rely on to do so many things day in and day out. The new model ‘s speed is wonderful to see and feel, but that speed coupled with way-beyond-solid performance is a killer combo.
Here are some of the ways the 3GS has shown me just how rock-solid reliable it is over the first two weeks:
2 reboots in 2 weeks, and neither was a real ‘needed ‘ reboot. On the first occasion I had installed a new app, some of its features didn ‘t work, and I thought a restart might correct that (it didn ‘t). On the second occasion, a little over a week ago, I rebooted simply because I wanted to check the amount of free memory after a fresh start. So “ two weeks, zero occasions where the iPhone ‘demanded ‘ a restart.
The iPhone handles it just fine when there is not a huge amount of free memory available. As you can see in the screencap at the top of this post, the 3GS has currently been running for well over 7 days. During that stretch, I ‘ve been checking free memory 3-4 times a day and I ‘ve seen occasions where memory is getting relatively low, but I ‘ve never experienced any lag at all (none!), no freezes, no latency on typing “ nothing “ everything has just sailed along.
During this last week of testing and watching memory handling a little bit, I ‘ve run a slew of apps on a daily basis. Many of the built-in apps, the new Voice Control app, lots of apps under review, games, big, resource-hungry games like Baseball Slugger and Doom Resurrection. I ‘ve done some video recording. In other words, I ‘ve hardly been ‘gentle ‘ with the 3GS in this respect. Never a blink. Doom even suggested on first launch that I might want to restart the device to get optimal performance in the game. Ignored that completely, and the game runs smooth every time.
It appears to recover memory much better than previous iPhones. I ‘ve often found that after checking and seeing just 10-20 MB free, I could look again in an hour or so, and see over 100MB free again, with no manual freeing of memory by me in the interim.
I ‘ve joked around in the EIC forums about forgetting how to make the 3GS do a restart because you just don ‘t need to do it. And that ‘s fine by me. I ‘m going to let it run and I ‘ll look it up in the manual if I forget. 🙂
What are your feelings about the 3GS so far? Finding it as solid as I am? Any major performance issues?
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TAGS: Free Memory, memory management
