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I wonder if the re-sale values will hold once more people realize that the 3G only gets EDGE data speeds on T-Mobile, and once everyone starts dumping their 3gs onto the market within the next 12 months...

I think they will. The 3g adds GPS functionality and alot of 2g tmobile users want it.

Plus if someone losses thier phone and needs a new one paying $300 is nothing compared to full price.
 
Signal Improvment

I am getting much better reception with the 3gs as well over the 3g.

Anyone else noticing it!!!
 
I won't try to put numbers to it, but everytime I pick up my new 3GS I am surprised how fast it is. I bought the original iPhone (2G) on openng day 2 years ago and used it continuously since then. I thought it was acceptably speedy, even after my wife picked up the 3G last year. But this new phone is blowing me away. No hesitation on the keyboard. Much faster app starts. And web page rendering is amazingly fast - desktop Safari fast.

I too waited two years to upgrade my phone, skipping the 3G, and I am glad I did. This thing is smokin'! And voice control and video are very good (for a phone device).

So, I can't put numbers on it, but subjectively the 3GS feels significantly faster. So fast that anything faster probably won't be noticable in normal usage. All my speed frustrations with the 2G phone are gone.

+1

I also went from 2G to 3GS, and the speed improvement is incredible. I played with Let's Golf and Tiger Woods this weekend on my 3GS, and it's fast and silky smooth - especially the course flybys. On the 2G, it would chug a big - not horrible, but you knew these games were pushing the hardware. On the 3GS, it's just much more noticeably faster...in fact, Let's Golf is *almost* too fast now!

:D

--DotComCTO
 
Probably has to do with both the speed and the extra RAM.

That is why it is so much faster.
 
+1

I also went from 2G to 3GS, and the speed improvement is incredible. I played with Let's Golf and Tiger Woods this weekend on my 3GS, and it's fast and silky smooth - especially the course flybys. On the 2G, it would chug a big - not horrible, but you knew these games were pushing the hardware. On the 3GS, it's just much more noticeably faster...in fact, Let's Golf is *almost* too fast now!

:D

--DotComCTO

I too went from 2G to 3G S and am very impressed. (it makes a really big difference two of my favorite games: Blackbeard and Montezuma. the latter could get almost unplayable on my 2G.)

I'm also impressed with AT&T's 3G network - I was expecting data to be noticably faster than EDGE, but it's well beyond my expectations. Although I'm sure the kbps numbers wouldn't actually bear this out, the subjective experience using 3G in boston has been almost like being on wifi. Not quite that good, but a lot closer to that than it is to being on EDGE.
 
this data is crap and means squat. Reminds me of the sales where they advertise up to 75% off, what the heck does that mean? They have a pair of trousers at 75% and the rest at 10% off.


The average is what is important, and on daily chores. :rolleyes:
 
lol.. 14-70 % reminds me of weathermen who say

"we should be getting 2-10 inches snow"

next week it will be 10 times faster.

It is weird how some people don't understand how this could be.

It would be like the weather man saying (not that I am defending weathermen, they have most low pressure job in the world since they dont ever have to be right), there will be from 2 to 10 inches of snow in the area. Then the next day there is 2 inches downtown, out to the west there is 10 inches, and to the east 3 inches and to the south 4 inches.

He would be entirely accurate.

Just like them saying 14%-70% would be accurate because it likely spans across a variety of apps, some of which show more of an improvement then others.
 
okay...

im calling BS

When i asked if it was faster.. she simply shrugged and said, "a little bit yea".
When the windows of range go from 14-70%, credibility is lost for me.

lol @ speed enhancements going from up to 2x faster to 4x faster in a weekend.

What's so hard to understand?

2x faster - Mostly CPU bound tasks because the CPU is so much better.
4x faster - Mostly graphics intensive applications.
A little big faster - loading from flash memory, which probably isn't that much faster than the flash memory in the 3G, and is the limiting factor.

That's why there's a range of improvements.

The 3GS has far far better graphics hardware, SGX instead of MBX, 4x faster isn't infeasible (especially since the MBX could have been CPU limited), even though it runs OpenGL|ES 1 as shaders on its OpenGL|ES 2 core.
 
Looks more like the increased VRAM is benefiting the 3GS. The 3G probably has to keep swapping in and out to accommodate that big track model. I doubt this is purely the 3GS being faster at rendering.

A first hand example is that I use to have a 8800GTX with 768MB vram and when I ran an nvidia demo of a face, it ran at around 40fps. When I got the 8800 GT SST (faster clocked but less vram, 512MB) it ran horribly around 6fps. The GTX is not 7 times as fast as the GT, it was the 512MB of the GT that was unable to handle the demo that was custom made for 768MB VRAM. So i'm sure you can push a game to the point where the 3GS looks great and 3G doesn't. I really wonder what the difference is on a small course model. I'm sure the 3GS is better, maybe 2.5x better, but 4x?
 
this data is crap and means squat. Reminds me of the sales where they advertise up to 75% off, what the heck does that mean? They have a pair of trousers at 75% and the rest at 10% off.

The average is what is important, and on daily chores. :rolleyes:

The average in this case is actually meaningless without the usage context. Most non-simple averages are meaningless because they make assumptions, such as weighting usage, or assuming that load time is as important as usage-performance.
 
This is good news for those planning to purchase a 3GS.

Still not enough to make me want to pay $700 for one, I'm looking forward to next years revolutionary iPhone (that will hopefully spank everything out there ;) )

Yeah hopefully and hopefully other carriers would have picked it up as well. :cool:
 
okay...

im calling BS

i understand it's faster.. really i do..my girlfriend upgraded her shattered screen 3G yesterday for a 32gb GS..

When i asked if it was faster.. she simply shrugged and said, "a little bit yea".
When the windows of range go from 14-70%, credibility is lost for me.

before you grab your blowtorches and try to flame me to a crisp understand that I eventually will be upgrading my 3G to the GS when i feel like it.
Since im of the many jailbreakers the storage capacity is the most (perhaps only) intriguing upgrade i have seen to be noteworthy.

lol @ speed enhancements going from up to 2x faster to 4x faster in a weekend.


No flaming here but you asked your girlfried? I asked my wife who went from a 1st gen to a 3GS and she said the same thing. Dont ask a woman! They dont know any better. :)
 
wow. sounds great. i'll most likely be getting one of these things soon, when i can just walk in the store and get one

I pre-ordered mine, but my friend walked into an AT&T Store on launch day... in the afternoon. There was no line, and he bought one right there.
 
If you play lots of games, expect some nice framerate increases and speedier load times. If you use a lot of "iFart" or business apps, expect small speed increases. The 3GS's CPU is about 2X as fast as the 3G, including better caching and stuff, but its GPU is about *7X* as fast as the 3G. It's faster accessing onboard storage as well, and apps that use lots of video ram will be less choppy when doing so.

Of course you won't see the biggest speed increases until you get apps designed specifically for the 3GS - apps written to take advantage of the double memory, for example, so that they have to access onboard storage less often.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/530.17)

jclardy said:
To everyone talking about the 2x - 4x "jump" in speed, the stats are correct. The thing is, the speed increase you get depends completely on what software you are running. If it is just opening Mail it will be a small increase, if you are actually pushing the cpu and graphics hardware like the video demo above then the performance difference will be much greater.

I can attest to this as my game currently in development has a lot of sprites and many particles on screen at once, on my iPod Touch 2G the framerate will occasionally stutter and drop a bit, on my 3G S it runs silky smooth no matter what. In a stress test of my game the 3G S can handle a lot more processor and video load at a decent frame rate than the old processor.

So the point of this post is that the speed increase depends entirely on the application and how it handles memory and utilizes the phones resources.

Oh and one last thing, for next years iPhone I highly doubt there is going to be a speed bump anywhere close to the magnitude of 3G->3G S. My bet is a redesigned case and probably a camera bump again. But it's at least a year away so who knows what will happen between now and then.

I have to disagree. In Mail is where I see some of the biggest improvements.

I sync 4 imap mail accounts and on 3G it brought the phone to a screeching halt. I would need to run Free Memory after I closed Mail every time.

On the 3G S it screams. I can just fly in and out of mailboxes like there's nothing to it.
 
I just recently had my 3G stolen about a week before the 3G-S announcement. I wouldn't have gotten one if I still had my 3G because I thought it was a "minor" update, but having been "forced" into getting the 3GS, I'm glad I did it. Not sure how much "faster" it is, but it is definitely more fluid in everything it does. Very happy with it.

EDIT: internet tethering alone was worth the new 3-year contract.

Um, you meant 2 year contract, didn't you? Since when did AT&T start offering 3-year contracts? What's next? Indentured Servitude? :D
 
Um, you meant 2 year contract, didn't you? Since when did AT&T start offering 3-year contracts? What's next? Indentured Servitude? :D

The iPhone is available in many, many countries. All with different carriers, plans, and prices.
 
okay...

im calling BS...

When i asked if it was faster.. she simply shrugged and said, "a little bit yea".
When the windows of range go from 14-70%, credibility is lost for me.

Yes, because why would you trust iPhone developers with a clear video of the difference. /sarcasm
The 14-70% was a completely different metric than game rendering. The iPhone 3GS IS indeed 2-4X faster in rendering depending on the specific workload.

In web browsing, the iPhone 3GS loads webpages in half the time of the iPhone 3G as per Anandtech's tests --- when many large websites are taking up to 30 seconds or more on the 3G . Over the course of a a 30-minute browsing session, that makes an enormous difference.

For basic tasks and application loading, you won't see a 4x difference, but again, if you use it as much as I do, over the course of a day the ~50% increase in speed will be a big time saver/
 
Hmm, the 3G does everything I want already, except play TTR at a consistent frame rate. If I got the 3GS so I could play TTR, I'd be getting a glorified (very very glorified :)) PSP/DSi thingy.

Lucky bastards those 3GS owners...

glorified PSP + Decent camera with spot focus + decent video recorder (far better than most smartphones I've useD)
 
The speed improvements are all nice and dandy, and are what people expect, but please macrumors, don't forget to talk about/address the lack of Xenon flash and the still very limited camera, lacking (digital) zoom, and it is still nowhere close to what competitors offer (Apple still playing catch up) and what it should have been by now i.e. 5 mega pixels.

Also, people like me who travel a lot, we are still being ripped off with data roaming – I had to pay over 600 Euro after testing a new turn-by-turn nav application, and I was told that the faster iPhone 3GS (no more 3G spaceS) would have pull even more data so you are warned!

p.s. the new iPhone appears to run a lot hotter, and I will do some testing tomorrow (thanks to Fluke) to see if I am right – you bet I am.
 
Hopefully some of you can convince me of the answer to the following...I have a 16GB 3G and am eligible to upgrade, so $199 for 16GB 3GS (I don't think I need 32GB since I usually don't get above around 12GB). It looks like I can sell my 3G for at least the $199 upgrade fee. The issue though is that I would need to sign a 2 year contract, meaning when the really improved model comes out a year from now presumably, I will be out of luck. Otherwise, I can just skip this version and hold out until next year. I am a heavy email user, somewhat regular user of internet, have a golf GPS app and many other smaller apps.

Thoughts? Suggestions?
 
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