Apple iPhone 3G Review

Overall Rating

So I love my iPhone and I couldn't live without it all things considered. I used to carry around a Blackberry and a mobile which wasn't an ideal situation. Add in the fact that I also carted around an iPod and a camera and the pockets were getting crowded. The iPhone gets rid of that dilemma for average everyday situations (I would still always take a camera on holiday or to a party for example). So it's already got lots going for it.

The more I use the iPhone the more I find new things to do with it so it becomes a vicious circle of usage. I have about 10 or 15 apps I use on a very regular basis including train times, tube status, restaurant finder, twitterfon, Facebook and even Ocado so I can do my shopping on the train!

On balance I think I have used this phone more than any other. I figure I am using it either to talk, email, listen to music or watch movies at least three or four hours a day so it would be wrong to compare performance and durability to other phones but you have to benchmark it somehow and it is, afterall, still billed as a clever phone so here are the downsides:

1. Batterylife: I can usually get it to last a normal working day 7am - midnight with general talking, email, watching one video, surfing the web a little bit using Edge and listening to music but anything out of the ordinary like enabling 3G or watching YouTube or more calls than average and the battery gets eaten up

2. Call disconnects: I know this is a problem for a lot of people in the US with all phones but I thought in the UK dropped called were a thing of the past until I got an iPhone. Certainly I never had a single dropped call in 5 years on Orange. On average I get one call a day that either cuts out half-way through or goes straight to voicemail without ringing (on one occasion in my hand when I was actually waiting for the call)

3. Locking. I think as part of normal wear and tear the accelerometer in my phone has come loose so that whenever a twist the phone it locks which is really annoying if you are using an app, or going from landscape to portrait. A quick bang normally sorts it out but that's not a high tech long term solution

They are my three main problems with it. I was actually really looking forward to the release of the 3Gs but having seen what it is I might hang on another year if I have the patience and wait for next year's model instead.