That is the question.
There are many pros and cons associated with switching to a 3G iPhone, making the decision fraught with anxiety. Only in America do weirdos like me agonize over buying a telephone.
Let’s make a list, as I am wont to do when making a decision of this enormous, earth-shattering magnitude.
Pro
- It’s a shiny new gadget
- 3G is much faster than EDGE
- GPS enables all kinds of cool location services
- I’ve heard that sound quality is better
Con
- Service cost is $15 per month more (the hardware cost is a wash because there are at least 2 people who are interested in buying my old phone). That means it will cost me $180 more per year for the 3G phone, which is annoying because:
- 3G coverage is spotty at best, at my house 3G is often non-existent (as is regular service, as well — and I live smack in the middle of Silicon Valley).
- Location services work with the current phone, just with far less accuracy. And so far, I don’t see a lot of compelling use for it from the current crop of applications.
- The back of the iPhone 3G is curved, and it rocks if you set it on a table and try to tap the screen — something I do a lot in meetings.
- The iPhone 3G is noticeably bigger than the original in every dimension; especially width which is obvious from the black border around the screen. It won’t fit in the change pocket of my jeans like the old one.
- All the other upgrades — from push calendars to Exchange support — are also available on the old phone now.
It all comes down to the perceived value of the 3G speed and the GPS chip. And I have a feeling that those become more important as one uses third party applications. This morning I tried to take a picture and post it on Twitter, but trying to tag it with geographic coordinates and upload it over EDGE was so ridiculously slow that finally Twitterific just gave up. One assumes that with GPS and 3G, that process would have been much faster. But how often will I use those features, I wonder?
The new 2.0 software on my old iPhone seems to be rather slow. Something as simple as opening the settings can take 3 seconds — count it out, that’s a long time. But is the new phone any better? I played with one for a few moments yesterday and didn’t see any real difference. I don’t know how much the memory space has to do with this; if I want a model with more memory I’ll have to get a 3G as the older version is no longer on sale.
oy.
