The first thing many people do after buying an iPhone is buy a bulky case for it. It’s understandable, it’s an expensive phone made of glass, and if you break it you have to pay $600 or more to replace it. But a case ruins the sleekness of the iPhones design, how it rests in your hand, and how you can easily slip it out of your pocket. That’s why for the entire one year span of having my iPhone 3G, I never used a case, even though I use it all the time to do ridiculous things. That’s just how I roll.
At first glance it looks like it’s in good condition.
I like to listen to the iPod app in the car using a headphone cable with my car stereo auxiliary input. I keep my iPhone in my lap while I drive so I can control the music. Sometimes when I get to my destination I jump out of my car and my iPhone flies across the pavement. This happened six or seven times. One time my screen got scratched, I was pissed at first but it’s a little scratch that isn’t noticable, and it’s on the top edge to the left of the battery status, a relatively unimportant area of the display.
The glass also got chipped during a fall.
The plastic usually takes it the worst.
There is another chip in the plastic next to my camera, and also some dirt jammed down around the lens housing.
The black iPhone plastic seems more resistant to shattering than the white iPhone plastic, a story familiar to MacBook owners. White MacBooks fractured far more easily than black ones. Take a look at my other iPhone, a white one used under identical conditions, except it was in a protective case about half the time. The plastic is fracturing in a radial pattern around the camera lens.
Final Thoughts
Be a man, go caseless, the iPhone is tough, it’s even quite waterproof. It’s also damn hard to photograph a shiny mirror phone without getting your reflection in the picture.
I turned on my faucet and it made a crazy bubble. By increasing the flow I could stretch out the bubble. I snapped these pictures before the bubble expired.
I was thinking that since the iPhone 3GS is such a small video camera that you could double ziplock bag it pretty easily to shoot under water video. Or maybe you don’t even need the ziplock bags.
simon | Art, Games, music | Thursday, June 25th, 2009
Michael Jackson died today. This is very sad because he was a musical genious, evidenced by the fact that he composed the music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Let’s all remember how great his music was and how it made Sonic the Hedgehog 3 sound awesome and not dwell too much about how he was a giant weirdo.
This short mix shows how the MJ’s Who Is It played at high speed sounds exactly like the Ice Caps level music.
Jackson was hired to compose the sound track because he was a big fan of Sonic . It makes sense though right? Jackson would be a fan of a childs game, because he loved playing child games on his Neverland ranch. He eagerly composed songs for every world in the game. Before the game was completed, his scandals about child molestation became public, so Sega covered up his involvement. For more details check out Sega-16’s thourough investigation.
Depending on what you are doing on your iPhone and what features you disable, your iPhone can last anywhere from 4 to 150 hours. The following is a list of what drains the battery most, in order of power drain.
Recording Video
LCD brightness
3D graphics, gaming
3G
GPS
WiFi
Bluetooth
Push
Recommendations for Max Battery Life
If you have a 3GS enable the battery percentage meter, you will gain a better sense of what activities drain your battery (Settings -> General -> Usage). Don’t go overboard on recording boring videos nobody will watch, you can see the battery percentage ticking away while shooting video (the processor is working hard to compress the video on the fly). Set your brightness to about 1/4, it’s bright enough and auto-brighness will kick in when you are under bright lights and sunlight. Don’t play 3D games if you need your battery life. Disabling 3G will give you a huge boost in battery life, I would say the phone lasts at least five times as long if not more, you can always enable it briefly to do some surfing or download email attachments. If you find yourself down to 10% battery life, disable 3G and you can make it another couple hours. Disable location services in the settings app, or avoid GPS apps like Google Maps and the Camera app. Always use WiFi instead of 3G when you can, but disable WiFi and use Edge for maximum battery life if you are only making calls and texting. Disable Bluetooth unless you need it. Disable Push email, push notifications, fetch mail less frequently from less email accounts.
Other tips
disable iPod equalizer as this utilizes the processor
set screen auto-lock to 1 minute to minimize LCD usage
turn on airplane mode in low or no coverage areas so that the phone isn’t constantly trying to establish a cellular connection
completely deplete the battery once a month to maintain battery health
update to the latest software, 3.0.1 as of August 2009
Disabling all these features makes having an iPhone kind of useless, if you keep the brighness at a moderate level it’s very hard to deplete the battery in one day, unless you talk on the phone for hours or play 3D games. If you are super hardcore consider replacing the internal battery with a higher capacity model.
Get the free AIM app for the iPhone, the new update adds push notifications for instant messages. It’s fast, I got a notified about a new IM in about 3 seconds.
My favorite new feature so far is the in-line volume controls on the included headset. With only three buttons you can adjust the volume, play/pause, change track, answer/hang up calls, and activate voice control to call a contact, dial a number, or play an artist.
Web browsing is also noticably faster, I pulled down 1.3 megabits with a speedtest app. Due to the increased memory, switching between Safari tabs no longer requires the page to reload.
I don’t know what to think of the digital compass, when I’m in a vehicle it always complains of interference. Here’s a screenshot showing me driving down the highway backwards. To recalibrate the compass you swing the 3GS around in a figure eight, if you see a dude waving his phone around like a moron that’s probably me.
The 3.2 megapixel camera is excellent. You can touch to focus, with auto macro. The picture above of the inline remote was taken with my 3GS. Here is a video I shot this weekend:
Update: When I first took my new iPhone 3GS for a spin I wasn’t sure if the new features was worth the price tag, but the the speed has proven to be worth it. I just saw a crazy dirty car on the highway, snapped a picture and blogged it in about one minute (see above). With the 3G, the camera app would not have opened in time to get the shot, the shutter delay would have missed the shot, and my Wordpress app would have taken longer to compose the post.
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