The northlondonhippy

I’ve had my geek on for the last week. I suc­cess­fully updated all three of my Macs to Snow Leop­ard and I swapped my iPhone 3G for the new 3GS.

Snow Leop­ard
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The upgrades were very smooth and sim­ple, though I did have some hard­ware trou­ble with my three year old Mac Mini. The Snow Leop­ard instal­la­tion DVD would not mount in the Super­Drive, instead it would try to read it, then spit it out. A healthy dose of canned, pres­surised air sprayed into the DVD slot cured it and I was able to com­plete the installation.

The changes with Snow Leop­ard are sub­tle, but wel­come. Expose and Stacks are notice­ably improved and more use­ful, the Finder tweaks are also quite cool, espe­cially the icon siz­ing and pre­view func­tions. Mainly, every­thing is a lot faster, start-ups, shut­downs and espe­cially sleep­ing and wak­ing. When I wake up my iMac now, it recon­nects to my net­work almost instantly.

The best thing is the amount of hard drive space I got back on each com­puter, around 10-12gb. Stream­lin­ing is a good thing!

I bought the fam­ily pack ver­sion of Snow Leop­ard, which cost £39, so that’s thir­teen quid per com­puter. A bargain!

I haven’t had any seri­ous issues so far, all of my reg­u­lar soft­ware is work­ing fine. Safari seems espe­cially fast and launches like a rocket. Oh and maybe I’m crazy, but the screen seems sharper, like they’ve improved the graph­ics card dri­vers, or the way it ren­ders images, I don’t really know.

iPhone 3GS
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I’ve had it in the back of my head that if I didn’t get a new iPhone by the end of the sum­mer, I would leave it until next July. I’ve tried to buy one a cou­ple of times, but they haven’t been in stock. They are appar­ently still in great demand.

I decided that if I was going to do this, I would buy the iPhone out­right, get­ting it on Pay As You Go, rather than get­ting it as a con­tract upgrade. By doing it this way, I will then be eli­gi­ble for a sub­sidised upgrade next Sum­mer, when the next model comes out.

What finally pushed me towards act­ing is a friend of mine lost his iPhone 3G and needed to replace it. O2 wanted silly amount of money from him for a new one and he offered to buy mine. I agreed, if I could find a black, 32gb 3GS on PAYG.

O2 didn’t have any, the Car Phone Ware­house didn’t have any, but the online Apple Store said they were ship­ping them on 5 days delay. I went ahead and ordered it last Tuesday.

It shipped on the Thurs­day and arrived in my hot lit­tle hands on the Fri­day. Wow, that was fast!

Swap­ping phones was an absolute breeze. I popped my con­tract SIM out of the old 3G iPhone, then popped it into the new 3GS. I con­nected the 3GS to my iMac and it instantly appeared in iTunes. It was acti­vated in sec­onds, then offer­ing to restore it from my most recent back-up, done an hour before. It restored and synced my media quickly. It was set up just like my old iPhone, even my apps were in the same places.

I did have to re-enter a few pass­words for email accounts and tweak a few set­tings, but I would say 98% of it hap­pened automatically.

Wip­ing the old phone took longer than set­ting up the new one. The old iPhone switched on and worked with­out a SIM card and I was able to reset all set­tings with a cou­ple of clicks. Be warned, it takes around 2 hours to wipe a 16gb iPhone.

So what do I think of my new iPhone 3GS?

I’ll say this right now, it is not an essen­tial must-have upgrade. I’ve gained a few use­ful and wel­come fea­tures and a lot of speed, but that alone is not worth the money.

The increase in speed is obvi­ous, the entire phone is faster and more respon­sive. Apps launch almost instantly, there’s no lag at all.

The video cam­era is good, not great, but bet­ter than no video func­tions at all. The tap-to-focus fea­ture is very cool and really works. The com­pass is also a nice thing to have, espe­cially if you use the Map app to get around on foot, it really helps to ori­ent your­self in new surroundings.

And who wouldn’t want extra storage?

I’m sure I will sell my 3GS next sum­mer when the next iPhone upgrade comes, it will still have con­sid­er­able value then. If the 3GS is con­sid­ered an evo­lu­tion­ary upgrade, then next sum­mer hope­fully we will see a rev­o­lu­tion­ary jump in iPhone tech­nol­ogy. At least, that’s what I’m gambling!

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