The first impression after updating to iPhone 3.0 is that it’s responsiveness, has gone bad. It was slow in response from hitting the Home button to wake the screen, changing language inputs, and even just flicking through the pages was a bit slow. That’s my first impression as it boots up the first time from iPhone 3.0.

Then it was time to really play around with it. There’s these new features like ‘Cut, Copy & Paste’, MMS and so on… These were all the featured updates, so I’m not going to go through them here. What I want to mention however, are these…

1. MMS (Hong Kong 3 users)
2. Visual Voicemail (Hong Kong 3 users)
3. Tethering
4. Pros
5. Cons

1. MMS

As a 3 customer in Hong Kong, before the update, when you receive a MMS, you in fact receives a SMS with a link and password so that you can access the media on the Safari browser (or any other browser on the computer). On the day before iPhone 3.0 was released, 3 sent out SMS’s notifying their customers that the iPhone 3.0 will be released at 01:00 on 18 June (HKT) and that your account will have MMS activated latest by 26 June even if you don’t ask for it. If you would like to have the service activated earlier, you may open a link and do so there, which is exactly what I’ve done.

MMS Activated

Then I received this confirmation the next day.

Confirmation

So that’s it, activated!

There weren’t any of my friends ready for it yet so I had to wait a few days before I can actually try it out. Now that it’s been a while, I’ve come to realize that the MMS services is totally not reliable! There will be times where ur MMS would be left in the messages unsent! You’ll only come back to it after a few hour finding that it’s still sitting there! Why can’t it try sending it till ts done or at least give you a warning or a popup? Anyway, the other problem with 3′s MMS service is that even though it’s shown that the message has been sent, it doesn’t actually mean that your message has been successfully delivered to the recipient! I was just trying to send a contact to my friend sitting right next to me while having a few drinks at the bar. We waited and waited bit it never got to her phone! I had to send it again through email where she got it almost instantly! Sigh… It was so embarrassing!

2. Visual Voicemail

Let’s talk about the Visual Voicemail now. With 3 Hong Kong, you actually have to pay a HKD$8 monthly fee to use this service. Well, I’ve got them to waive my first 12 months but why should we be paying more for services that should have been included a year ago? Annoying 3! Anyways, for some reasons, I find that some of my voicemail goes missing after a day or 2. Say, I used to have 5 voicemail, the next day I go back into Visual Voicemail, there would only be 1. I don’t know if this is the case with everyone else. Visual Voicemail is indeed a very good thing to have, but what good can it do if they go missing?

Setting up Visual Voicemail

Visual Voicemail gone missing...

3. Tethering

For those of you who don’t know what ‘tethering’ is, here’s a simple definition. It’s using the iPhone’s data connection so that your computer can go online either via USB or Bluetooth. I only found out on the second day that you the setting for using tethering is already in the ‘Settings’ on the iPhone, thanks to @nefuis! The setup process was seamless! I was at my mum’s office the day I tried out tethering with my MacBook and it only took about 15 seconds for it to be setup! Amazing!

Tethering in action!

Tethering in action

I know this sounds such a wanker, but I even tried using tethering while I was on the bus. The connection was very good apart from some of the dead spots where there’s no network coverage. The connection speed was very acceptable too!

4. Pros

It has already been a while since I’ve updated to iPhone 3.0 and there’s things I love about it and things I hate about it. Let’s talk about the Pros for now. While physically using the iPhone, you’ll find that there’s a lot of minor things that makes your life so much easier. Say for example, while you’re typing in the email addresses, it not only searches the address on your iPhone, it instantly searches the Global Address Book on the Microsoft Exchange Server! How handy! You’ll also notice while in Recent call list of the Phone application, it now shows you which number of the contact was incoming and outgoing! I used to have this trouble of calling back someone’s ‘Home’ number whereas I should be calling their ‘Mobile’. There’s also a new category named ‘iPhone’. And how good is it to finally have copy, cut & paste! It’s so helpful to finally be able to send multiple photos directly from the iPhone!

5. Cons

I’m sure a lot of iPhone 3.0 users are very happy with their update. But I seriously find that the iPhone is getting slower each day. I’m not just pointing my fingers at 3rd party apps. Even with Apple’s default apps! The one that’s really starting to piss me off is the message app. It’s now taking forever to launch! I’m sure most of us uses a fair bit of messaging these days. It’s just getting ridiculous! You might also notice a change in its predictive text. It’s not auto-capping after ‘!’ & ‘?’. I’m in a place where we have to change between languages fairly often, like Traditional Chinese and English, which are quite common in Hong Kong. When you’re switching between handwriting recognition, pinyin and English, it takes so long that you can actually have a sip of coffee, come back to the phone and it’s still not ready! Hope that this is simply a software problem that can be fixed in the next update and not a hardware issue where iPhone 3.0 is too much for the 2nd generation iPhone 3G to handle.

PK Lai