Apple iPhone 3G Cell Phone Review - Conclusion

Conclusion
The iPhone 3G is the next iteration of Apple's immensely popular and iconic cell phone. In one short year it's managed to have a serious impact on the industry and with the iPhone 3G going global that's only going to get bigger. There are two big questions that we asked ourselves when writing this review, how good is the iPhone 3G all by itself, and how big an upgrade is it over the original iPhone? Let's start with the first question, the answer is that the iPhone 3G is a very good cell phone. It's an excellent media player, brings powerful business productivity features to the table, especially with the Exchange integration, is one of the best music/video phones on the market and is just beautiful and a joy to use. Very few people will fail to be impressed by this device, and if you decide to spend your money on it you will likely be very happy with it. The one caveat we have is that battery life may be iffy, especially with the battery hungry 3G network. We'll be testing battery life shortly and will update this conclusion when we have those results.

To answer the second question we don't think the iPhone 3G is a huge upgrade over the previous iPhone. In particular we found it disappointing to see many features that we've been asking for like MMS, a better camera and copy & paste were not included. 3G is a mixed bag, yes it's faster but it also kills your battery much faster, although the larger battery in the iPhone 3G ameliorates this somewhat. In our mind the iPhone 3G is more of a 1.5 rather than a 2.0. We'd recommend to current iPhone owners that unless there's some compelling reason to upgrade, for example if you currently have terrible audio quality, just keep on holding on, there will be better things coming.

Who's It For

Business User
With Exchange integration the iPhone 3G is a now a very compelling busines device. The thing that gives us the most pause is the email, the annoyance of having to jump between a bunch of screens just to check multiple accounts is something no BlackBerry user has to live with. If you can live with it, the iPhone will serve you well otherwise.

Budget Callers
Don't buy into the "half the price" junk, it's more expensive than the previous iPhone and no one on a budget should consider this phone.

Chatty Teenager
Ok, they're going to love it, they're going to want it and if Mom and/or Dad can afford it, and they're going to get it.

Media Maven
The music and video playback is great, there's no debating that, but we can't help look at that two megapixel camera that's actually worse than the previous generation and pine for a Nokia N95. If the camera doesn't matter to you then jump on it, if it does you might want to look at alternative media devices.

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