Not bad press, and the quality was decent, too!

News segment filmed with iPhone 3GS

(Thanks Andy)

This story rocks and you know someone on the Find my iPhone team at Apple is very proud today.

Great job everyone!

How popular is the iPhone one might ask? Well the iPhone (at least up until the 3Gs) has had a fairly cruddy camera. It does ok, but even now, no flash, low megapixels, which to be fair, compares to other phones, but still, not great.

Check out the Flickr charts on camera usage. The first one is all cameras, then the third chart are phone cameras.

That will tell you how popular the iPhone really is:

Flickr Camera Usage Charts

I picked up my iPhone 3Gs this morning. Because this is the third iPhone model, the lines were much shorter than two years ago. Only 40 or so people ahead of me, and it took an hour in line to pick up the phone and head out the door.

So, how does it compare to my generation 1 phone?

1. Lighter. This could be said of the 3G as well, but it is a nice change
2. The oil resistant screen kinda works, but it is still fairly oily. My old phone wasn’t hard to clean, either
3. The video works, and isn’t bad
4. The camera’s auto focus/auto exposure is nice. I took a photo of Elizabeth, with a window behind her. She was totally dark, and tapping on her face didn’t help, but tapping on the pink shirt she was wearing did bring it into proper exposure. Said photo is not available due to a take-down notice by the copyright holder. (Apparently 8am photos are a no-no)
5. Application launching is much, much faster, easily twice as fast if not more
6. The voice dialing works. The first number I tried was “goog 411.” Then I tried Elizabeth, but I didn’t wait for the menu of phone choices to finish before speaking, and it gave up. You can’t interrupt it like you can with the goog 411 voice menu. Once I waited, it was happy.
7. 32gb > 8gb. Finally, my full music library back, and videos
8. Setup was easy. In the store, I entered my mobileme info and before I got out of the mall, the phone had all of my contacts. That makes mobileme so worthwhile. Once I got home, I restored from backup.
9. Standing in line at 6:10am paid off with an activated phone. I know two people who have been waiting for awhile now, and this story claims it could take up to two days. Ouch.
10. The compass is cool. I guess it needs calibration by moving the phone in a figure 8. The Apple Store employee must have done it for me.
11. The water and pastry the Apple Store supplied were much appreciated.
12. The GPS initially put me in my neighbor’s house, the it stuck me in my garage. I think the mapping data for our neighborhood is off.
13. Signal coverage for 3g seems better; Usually 4-5 bars. I saw it dip to 1 bar once, then back up to 5. I have not made any real calls on it yet.
14. Compass + GPS kicks ass. Can spin around and always know which way I am facing on the map
15. My gmail password didn’t sync, nor did my app profiles, not sure why. For a friend, they all did.

Sync Issues

After syncing with my laptop for apps, and then syncing with the desktop for videos, I have 5.3gb of videos in 81 items I cannot get off the phone, according to itunes. No idea where this media is.

Well, it was all in older podcasts, and iTunes refused to unsync them, so I had to delete every podcast episode, then and only then did itunes delete the content from the iPhone