BEST Must Have Gadget

You could be forgiven for having iPhone fatigue by now. We kind of do, which is why the winner of this category was hotly debated here at Urbis. But the fact is, that despite being overly anticipated, hyped and analysed – and despite its faults and bugs – this is the greatest gadget to have hit the market since, well, since the first iPhone reared its head a year ago.
As anyone with access to the media will know, people with little else to do waited for days outside shops for the launch of the iPhone 3G – obviously because it’s the first time New Zealand and Australian users have ‘officially’ had the chance to use one. It was immediately obvious that the 3G’s functionality is above and beyond the hacked-and-cracked parallel-imported first-generation incarnations. Calls are louder and clearer with less background noise, and the 3G data speeds are impressive.
Visually, the 3G looks rather similar to its older sibling. A curved plastic shell replaces the old metal back, and is partially responsible for that voice-call improvement. However this plastic back also means that – like the rest of us over the past 12 months – the iPhone has become a little thicker around the middle. The iPhone’s new operating system (iPhone OS 2.0) is more open to third-party developers, so the iTunes App Store has been launched along with the 3G iPhone. The App Store is groaning with applications to pimp your iPhone in a plethora of ways – both free and paid.
So the 3G has made the iPhone legit for us Antipodeans and it sports some improvements, but after spending some time with it there are of course some gripes. There’s a big lag when switching between ‘portrait’ and ‘landscape’ mode when browsing the web – and it’s not above the odd random crash. Nevertheless Apple has proven itself adept at selling ‘individuality’ to the masses – and although these days owning an Apple product only makes slightly more of a statement than owning, say, a toothbrush – we also know that if you get a shiny new iPhone you’ll hold it with the same smug self-satisfaction as everyone since those iPhone 3G pioneers we saw lining up outside Vodafone a couple of months back. So take a bow, iPhone 3G. You may be a bit buggy, you may be missing video, a Flash player, ‘cut and paste’ and wireless synching – but you’re still the Apple of our eye. For now. DC