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Record­ing my first iPhone 3G S video! on 12seconds.tv

“I don’t get it. Why are you so excited about buy­ing the exact same phone?” I heard that more than a few times. And, though I defended my move from first-generation to brand-spanking-new iPhone, part of me was wor­ried. After play­ing with the new fea­tures, would the nov­elty would wear off and buyer’s remorse sink in?

After a long week­end of pic­tures, video, web brows­ing, file trans­fers, app down­loads, and voice com­mands, I can hap­pily say this is not the same phone I’ve used for the past year and a half.

Apple made the account trans­fer process com­pletely pain­less. I know some peo­ple have been hav­ing trou­ble with phone acti­va­tion acti­va­tion, and maybe it was because I got to the store so early, but a help­ful Apple Store employee at the Tow­son Town Cen­ter had me up and run­ning in about two min­utes. I was com­pletely unpre­pared for her to smile and say, “That’s it!” My total time in the Apple store couldn’t have been more than five minutes.

There were obvi­ous hard­ware dif­fer­ences made to the iPhone when the 3G model came out last year, but they’re all new to me now. Migrat­ing from the metal design, the curved plas­tic case just feels more nat­ural in my hand. Com­par­ing the two, I didn’t notice a huge dif­fer­ence in weight, but the iPhone 3G S appeared to be just a hair lighter.

The speaker on the 3G S is fan­tas­tic com­pared to my old iPhone. The speak­er­phone is actu­ally use­ful, and I was aston­ished at how good the audio from music and movies sounds. Record­ings from the new Voice Memos app the audio sound clear and sharp, even bet­ter than my old iRiver pocket audio recorder which I used for pod­casts a few years ago. In a pinch, the phone could be used for good-quality on-the-spot interviews.

And then there’s the new cam­era. The jump to a 3.0 megapixel aut­o­fo­cus cam­era is amaz­ing. No, it won’t replace my DSLR, but I’m sure I’ll pro­duce some print-worthy shots with this cam­era, at least in well-lit con­di­tions. The absence of a flash will still make some pho­tos tough to take, but for quick snap­shots, it’s just what I need. Here’s a close-up I took of some rasp­ber­ries at my par­ents’ place over the week­end. I love the macro focus.

I will have to do some side-by-side com­par­isons, but I have a hunch that the video pro­duced by the new iPhone looks slightly bet­ter than what was pro­duced by old Flip cam­era. Though it records 640 by 480 standard-def video, the iPhone 3G S even per­forms bet­ter in low-light con­di­tions than my Kodak Zi6, which severely drops its frame rate. (To be fair, the Zi6 totally rocks the 720p high-def in bright light, and with a dig­i­tal zoom to boot.) Here’s a video of my sis­ter spin­ning fire in the dark. (Yes, I know, my sis­ter is amazing!)

The video cam­era records in both por­trait and land­scape modes, but I’m not cer­tain whether or not I like that. While a ver­ti­cal 480 by 640 clip looks inter­est­ing and could be use­ful, nearly every video shar­ing ser­vice will have to come up with a way to han­dle these odd-sized files. For exam­ple, 12 sec­onds rotates my video to the more tra­di­tional 640 by 480 ori­en­ta­tion, which causes my entire video to look like it’s on its side.

Macro focus on the iPhone 3G S! on 12seconds.tv

Trim­ming a video clip is ridicu­lously intu­itive. Tap-and-drag either end, press play to pre­view, then tap the “Trim” but­ton. Done. When con­nected to your com­puter, the videos sync up in iPhoto along with your pic­tures. I’m sur­prised but thank­ful that iMovie is left out of the mix, but it makes me won­der if Apple has plans to com­bine iMovie and iPhoto at some point down the line. It seems almost silly to have to drag movies out of iPhoto and into iMovie if I want to stitch a few of them together.

As cool as all these video fea­tures are, I still believe it should have been a launch-day fea­ture two years ago. The fact that it took this long to appear in Apple’s high-end smart­phone is, frankly, embarrassing.

The iPhone’s “tap to focus” for still pho­tos is absolutely killer. I wouldn’t be sur­prised to see that fea­ture in DSLR and other dig­i­tal cam­eras very, very soon. It’s intu­itive, smart, and works incred­i­bly well. Just touch the part of the image you want to take a pic­ture of. Then, take the picture.

And the speed! This phone runs faster on the 3G net­work than my first-generation iPhone ran on my wi-fi con­nec­tion. The com­bi­na­tion of the 3.0 firmware and the new, faster proces­sor is wicked. Apps down­load and install almost instantly. Web­sites load at blaz­ing speeds. It com­presses video, attaches to email and sends it within sec­onds. The jump from first-gen iPhone to 3G S is lit­er­ally the same as jump­ing from dial-up to broad­band Inter­net. It reminds me of the first time I had high-speed Inter­net at home.

So those are my ini­tial obser­va­tions. As I go through my first work week with the phone, I’m sure I’ll come up with more things to write about, or remem­ber things I for­got to men­tion. So far, all of my fears and reser­va­tions about this phone have been squashed, and my entire expe­ri­ence so far has just rocked.

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