iPhone 3Gs

Of course I had to get the new iPhone. I feel kind of bad about this although, as I said to number one wife as I headed off to Carphone Warehouse “I don’t drink, gamble or chase women. I just get gadgets”. She may have muttered something under her breath about how much cheaper it would be if I did those things instead, but I can’t see what the problem is really. After all, I am letting her have my old iPhone…

Anyhoo, down to the shop, out with the proof of address and away we went. I was taking out a new contract, and so I had to have a new number. They actually try to charge you for “memorable” numbers. If you want repeating values, or sequences of digits in your phone number you can pay up to sixty quid for the privilege . I had this vision of a room full of “number miners” going through all possible permutations and shouting “strike” when they found a really good one. I suspect they use a computer program though. I didn’t pay extra for two reasons. Firstly I was spending enough as it was, and secondly I couldn’t see anything special about the more expensive ones anyway.

The new iPhone is very nice. The old one was nice too, but this one is nice faster. It has a compass, which means that it can orient the map relative to the way you are facing, which is massively useful. It looks pretty much exactly like the old one but the glass seems to shrug off fingerprints, which is nice.

I was quite looking forward to using the Voice Recognition feature, but unfortunately it turns out to be rubbish. Having experienced the wonder of Voice Command on Windows Mobile devices many years ago I was very keen to find out how the field had advanced on the iPhone. Turns out it has gone backwards. Voice Command used to let you do everything on your phone including play music albums by calling out their names. It never needed training and it always worked. Whereas the voice recognition on the iPhone does things like make phone calls when you want to listen to music, play music when you want to make calls and so on. I hope this is a difficultly with English accents or some other teething trouble, because at the moment it really is poor.

Overall I’m pleased with what I’ve got. I can’t see massive queues forming for this new device though, it is mostly evolutionary. When the new version of Windows Mobile comes out next year I reckon things are going to get even more interesting in the mobile space.