iPhone Orange
The Apple iPhone has changed the face of mobile phones - Time magazine called it the Invention of the Year in 2007 - but for over 2 years it was only officially available in the UK on the O2 network, so the only way to get an iPhone Orange was to buy an unlocked version. The iPhone 3Gs is now available on Orange too - great news for those who don't want to switch from their favourite network.
iPhone 3GS on Orange
The iPhone 3G was released on July 11, 2008 as an update to the original 2007 model and has gone on to be released in over 80 countries. The iPhone 3GS was released in June 2009 and the iPhone 3GS on Orange will be available very soon. The key features of the phone are the touchscreen with 'multi-touch', giving you the very cool ability to enlarge and reduce things like web pages with a spread of the fingers, and the iPhone 'apps' or applications that can be bought or downloaded free. These range from apps for finding your nearest restaurant to games galore with everything inbetween, and there are now thousands and thousands to choose from. Feature-wise there aren't many things that can be pinpointed as unique to the iPhone - lots of phones have touch screens now, Google Android phones and Nokia handsets have their own range of apps too - but there is just a wow factor, a cool factor to the iPhone that has made it so incredibly popular. The criticisms aimed at the original iPhone were mainly centred around the camera, as it was only 2 megapixels compared to the standard of around 5 megapixels for high end handsets when it was released. It also lacked the ability to record video and to copy and paste text but all of these shortcomings have been rectified by the 3GS.
When the original iPhone was released it was criticised for having a 2 megapixel camera when the standard for high-end phones was already around 5 megapixels. In waiting for the iPhone 3GS Orange users have benefitted by getting a 3 megapixel one instead, which doesn't sound like much of an improvement but is actually a very good camera which compared to the original performs better in low-light situations. It has autofocus along with smart exposure and white balance adjustment. You can choose the focus spot too - just tap on the area you want to focus on in the viewfinder and the camera adjusts focus, exposure and white balance to that spot. This means you can take a photo against a bright background without the subject in the foreground in shadow.
Camera and Video Features
3 megapixels
Autofocus
Tap to focus
Video recording, VGA up to 30 fps with audio
Photo and video geotagging
iPhone and third-party application integration
The iPhone 3GS also added the capablitiy to take video - a pretty basic mobile feature that was strangely omitted from the original model. Quality is 640x480 video at a full 30 frames per second (roughly the same as DVD) and it's very easy to use - you can edit videos on the iPhone 3GS, then email them or send them to YouTube (it will also compress video for emailing and web uploading).
Web Browsing
One of the killer features of the iPhone 3GS has to be the web browsing, and the iPhone on Orange is no exception. Safari is the standard web browser for Mac OSX and the version created for the iPhone is without doubt the best mobile web browser in the world. As well as having a really good quality 3.5 inch screen the iPhone has the 'multi-touch' feature, which is the spreading and closing of the fingers you see iPhone users doing all the time to zoom in and out of a web page or photo. If you were to pinpoint one feature that makes an iPhone special compared to the range of other handsets out there with similar specifications that would probably be it.
The iPhone 3GS improved the web functionality because compared to the original model it's faster - "S" refers to its enhanced speed (600 MHz compared to 412 MHz, with a dramatically improved graphics processor as well) and it has double the RAM (256 MB compared 128 MB) and support for faster 7.2 Mbps HSDPA too.
Music and Video
The main attraction of the Orange iPhone has to be the fact that it's also an iPod, so you have the full functionality of iTunes with 16GB or 32GB of memory built in, plus some amazing music-based apps available. The superior web access available on the 3G version also means that YouTube is one of the most popular features too, in fact with the Safari browser and the easy resizing of pages the web experience is superb all round. Another key feature of the iPhone 3GS Orange which has now become a standard on touch screen 'web' phones is the accelerometer, which is the built-in sensor that changes the screen from portrait to landscape and vice versa as you rotate the phone.
iPhone Apps
Having the iPhone on Orange means that customers of that network will now be able to explore the world of iPhone apps, where there are tens of thousands of applications available, either free or paid, to make your iPhone into all sorts of fantastically useful and/or stupid things.