New software features of 3GS
The manufacturer has of course been careful to provide some new features only on the new 3GS, as otherwise there would have been much less people to buy a new device only for the faster CPU – let’s just say that these exclusive new features might still not be enough to draw hundreds of thousands of people to the stores to get the new phone.
Why? Because there are surprisingly few features that are available on the new handset, but cannot be used on the old one. One of these is the digital compass, which looks really impressive, I have no idea how it works, it immediately shows the real/magnetic north after launch (we can set which one should be shown) and it displays our coordinates, even when inside a building.
Another bonus is voice recognition, which lets us start calls and control the music player – this will surely be a favorite one of those who have a headset. The voice recognition software doesn’t support many languages, so it could be a problematic one if we’re not native speakers of English and have non-English names in our contact list. Music playback control is ok, I think anyone can pronounce “play” and “shuffle”.
The third new feature could be the most useful one, as it helps handicapped people use the phone: we’re talking about zooming and text narration, text highlighting and mono sound. The first two are the more important ones, we can use only one of them at a time. Zooming is very simple, we have to double-tap the screen with three fingers to zoom in any part of the screen. We can zoom in to really any part, even the main menu, all features will be active, but of course we’ll have to scroll the screen, which is also done with three fingers. Narration is also great, if we turn it on, iPhone will read aloud the selected part with a great pronunciation, but it might be a bit fast. As we turn this feature on a marker will appear, we can place this anywhere we want with a tap, and all simple taps from now on have to be replaced with a double, so we have to work this way to launch programs/press buttons. The software can read any information on the screen, even text messages. I’d like to note that the narration algorithm is much, much better than the one on the Nokia Series 60 handsets.
The phone is of course faster than its predecessor, this is quite evident. We’ll mostly feel this when launching resource-hungry games and when browsing the web, as iPhone loads web pages about twice as fast as the simple 3G. This is also true when launching games, but we won’t feel much difference at system apps, for example the e-mail client launches in less than a second, this takes about half a second longer on 3G.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
