It seems that the iPhone 3Gs compass is very sensitive to magnets, such as those in speakers (e.g. speakers in your car’s dashboard and door panels)
Click to continue reading “iPhone 3Gs – Compass Interference”
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It seems that the iPhone 3Gs compass is very sensitive to magnets, such as those in speakers (e.g. speakers in your car’s dashboard and door panels)
Click to continue reading “iPhone 3Gs – Compass Interference”
Lets start with the good… The most significant feature of the iPhone 3Gs is as Apple has touted, the speed. Most apps load at least 30% faster than they did 3G. Graphic intensive apps perform signifcantly better (Google Earth is incredible). Video recording is excellent on the phone, rivaling ‘flip’ class pocket camcorders, but upload quality to youtube and e-mail is severly lacking. I’m looking forward to jailbraking so I can get the native resolution vids. Copy/Paste is better than I expected. I love the clipboard integration with Safari- allowing you to copy HTML blocks including images and hyperlinks. I’m also very pleased with the landscape view of e-mail.
I still haven’t played with Voice Memos. I enabled MMS and tethering through the the little hack listed on some other websites. I haven’t sent an MMS message yet, but I did tether to my Macbook, and it worked very well. Prior to the 3.0 firmware and the 3Gs, the only way to tether was to jailbreak and use PDANet ($30) or a combination of command line utilites. Today at work I ran a speed test with my 3Gs and native tethering and had a coworker use PDANet with her 3G. My download speeds were roughly twice as fast. We’ll see how much AT&T will want to charge for the official version of this feature, it should be free.
Now for some of the things I am disappointed with. The compass integration with Google maps is terrible. It seems that when the compass is activated in Google Maps, the GPS doesn’t track. I’m hoping that this was just a limitation wtih the Maps app and not with the hardware (pehaps Tom Tom will inface come through with real Nav software). More on video… immediately after I recorded and uploaded my first video, I was prompted with a dialog that asked me if I wanted to view the video on YouTube. I tapped yes and got an error message that said the format wasn’t supported. I assume that YouTube was still encoding the video, but it still seemed like a huge bug. Here’s a link to the aforementioned video.
I really haven’t played with Voice Command enought to give any opinion, but I think it’s cool to tell the iPhone what artist you want to listen to and it just plays it.
That’s all for now.