Unlocked iPhone 3G review

Phone calls, data transfer

The most important new feature of the handset is that it supports third generation mobile networks. To tell the truth I think that this should have been a feature of the first one too, it’s quite a scam to launch a new phone just for this, but this is how the Apple marketing machinery works. Making phone calls goes the same way, it’s still a pleasant thing to talk on an iPhone, sound quality is really good. Shockingly there’s no video calling, I couldn’t start or receive such a call. The list of default ringtones is really poor, it’s a set of tweets, it’s really as if we had travelled five (or even better: ten) years back in time. Even more, only Mac owners can set MP3 ringtones, which is rather pathetic.

At the time when the first iPhone has been launched we had a great deal of trouble because that didn’t handle contacts on the SIM card. Fortunately this has been corrected by the apple by now, so we can see the magical Import SIM Contacts button on i3G – don’t misunderstand me, I didn’t mention this as a positive thing, as the support for SIM contacts is the most basic feature that a cell phone must know! The contact list now has a separate icon in the menu, but it still can be accessed from the Phone menu. Contacts can have a photo and a ringtone assigned to the, while the other extra fields are as follows: e-mail, web address, mail address, tons of names (like nickname and phonetic name), workplace, birthday, anniversary that can have a unique label, note.

I won’t start praising the web browser called Safari, I will just shortly note that currently this is the most advanced and most usable web browser for mobile devices, it’s much, much better than even Opera Mobile 9.5. Its only flaw is that it has no Flash support, but we are told that Adobe is developing it. Without this I couldn’t access the popular SpeedTest.net website, so I tested the phone’s speed on the Vodafone HSDPA network, using three national sites. I ran the tests three times; the table below has the mean values. As a comparison I have also included the results of my desktop PC (with a Huawei E220 modem).

Although iPhone falls a bit behind the desktop PC, but the results are still great for a cell phone. So web browsing is not just a great experience, but it’s also fast, I liked it. For the sake of owners of unlocked iPhone’s I’d like to mention that the APN setting is not visible in the menu when using a T-Mobile card, so in order to set it up first insert the card of a different network operator, set up T-Mobile’s APN and then insert the T-Mobile SIM. I do not know if this bug is present on other T-Mobile networks or just the Hungarian one, as I had no chance of testing it.

A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!