Jim Liddle's blog

So I finally got my hands on an iPhone 3G but am currently still favoring my iPhone 2.5G - why?

• The signal seems better.
• 3G signal is patchy at best and forget receiving calls when you have 3G on - horrible...
• The battery life is **much** better on the original iPhone than on the 3G iPhone.
• All my accessories such as Power Monkey fit the original iPhone but not the new 3G iPhone as Apple in their wisdom changed the connector.
• GPS is slow and actually I find that the triangulation using Skyhook on the original phone works good enough.

Next, suprisingly, I cannot find the applications I really would like on the App Store. What would I miss or give up if I used the 3G iPhone full time?

Fring: Fring is the only messenger that aggregates all the IM clients I use - MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Skype, IRQ - the closest on the App store is Palringo, but there is no Skype. Instead you have to rely on IM+ for Skype via the web (which is excellent).

Terminal: No Terminal for iPhone 3G, even if you unlock it. The closest you can get is Mocha Telnet for VT100 emulation but there is no SSH access.

iSisk: Nothing like iSisk for the iPhone although this may turn up on Cydia (unlocked app).

MCleaner: Nothing like MCleaner (SMS and phone firewall), which is an unlocked app.

SmartRSS: Still prefer this unlocked app to all the RSS apps I have seen on the App Store so far.

VideoRecorder: This unlocked Video application is superb and there is nothing like it yet on the app store for the iPhone 3G.

Blogging: I'm really disappointed with all the native blogging apps - both WordPress and Typepad will not work on my phone. In the case of WordPress as soon as I enter the endpoint it just crashes. I'm still using BlogSME, a web app that caters to lots of different blogs including blog-city where this blog is hosted, but it would have been nice to have a native app that can hook into the photos.

Also MobileME has been a disaster. Half the time it does not work. I'm still using SMEScheduler to manage appointments and the iPhone version of SMEStorage to get my files on the move (and to be honest irrespective of MobileME working would continue to use these two apps as they really work great, particularly the Storage app, which now supports offline files using Data URLs and also provides support now for viewing PowerPoint files for the 3G iPhone).

So all in all, not quite ready to swap my old iPhone for the new one quite yet...