Is the iPhone 3G Still a Good Phone?

One of the world’s most hyped phones, the old king of the cell phone kingdom, iPhone 3G ruled the 2008-09 session until the 3GS came. Apple iPhone has converted to two younger avatars after that, the iPhone4 and 4S. Still, there are numerous iPhone 3G users who has not upgraded their device. You can still buy a new or refurbished 3G from the sites like ebay. But the question is good is the phone in comparison with the today’s cell phones with similar price tags. You can buy a new 16 GB new iPhone unlocked at about 300$.

Some good mobile phones available today at that unlocked price range are HTC ChaCha, Blackberry Curve 3G, Samsung Wave 2 and Ace, Motorola Defy and Fire XT . Except Blackberry and Wave2, other handsets mentioned are powered by Google’s Android Mobile OS.

Apple iphone 3G has a 412 Mhz ARM11 processor and 128 MB RAM. The iPhone 3G’s 3.5 inches display’s resolution is 320 x 480, resulting 165 ppi density. This is not very impressive in today’s standards. But the competitors among the same price range are not very good either. HTC ChaCha and Blackberry Curv have keyboards and so they have smaller screens. Samsung Galaxy Ace and Motorola Fire XT has almost same screen size and resolution. Only, Samsung Wave II and Motorola Defy are better. Defy has a 3.7” display with 480 x 850 resolution and Wave II with 3.7” and 480 x 854. The screen quality is very good in Wave II and Defy. The iPhone 3G’s display has a special olephobic coating and the glass is scratch resistant.

The iPhone 3G was famous for its sleek and fluid user interface. The user interfaces of the rivals of today are also neither bad nor ugly. Blackberry OS is not up to the mark but the Android Gingerbread 2.3 in Fire XT and HTC ChaCha is top notch. IPhone 3g can be upgraded to iOS 4 but that will make the device slower. It is better in iOS 3.

By raw processing power iPhone 3G is miles behind from the others. A 412 MHz processor is no match to 1 GHz of Wave II or 800 MHz of the others. But in day to day use the iPhone 3G never shows serious lagging or app crashing problems.

The camera of iPhone 3G is a 2MP one. Only Blackberry Curv has such a low power camera, all the rest have 5 MP. It even cannot shoot a video! The best camera among the rivals is of Samsung Wave II. Besides shooting excellent 2592 x 1944 images it can record video @ 720p HD.

But hardware is not always the important point. You can access the sea of apps- the iTunes App store by using iPhone 3G. Here you can check millions of interesting apps and games. But you cannot play modern graphics heavy iPhone games using your 3g. On the other hand, the best hardware prize winner among the contenders, Samsung Wave II runs on Bada OS, you cannot find many apps. But Anroid market place is a different place. You can also access plethora of apps and games using a Motorola Defy or Samsung Galaxy Ace.

The iPhone’s sound quality is up to the mark. The competitors are also good performer. While watching videos iPhone 3G is not that impressive compared to Defy or Wave II. iPhone 3G has limitations while loading music. You must have to use ITunes via PC to transfer music into it.

The web browsing experience is good in iPhone 3G. Pages load smoothly and without much client side delay. But iPhone 3G cannot show flash. The Android mobiles like defy supports a good quantity of Flash. That is why web browsing is a more complete experience in these.

After considering all these points we can decide that the old is too old to be modernizing now. In the modern world of neck breaking speed technological advancement in mobile world iPhone 3G is outdated and overpriced.