iPhone 3G hands-on report round-up

A number of hands on reports are beginning to appear around the Web from those WWDC attendees lucky enough to get some, albeit limited, hands on action with the iPhone 3G.  The reports are mostly positive.

Joanna Stern on her blog for Laptop Mag was lucky enough to get some photos of the new white iPhone 3G. Check the above link for those. She commented that the new device definitely had 'Speedy Browsing' as follows:

"It took the phone 4 seconds to load www.laptopmag.com, 2 seconds to load cnn.com and 3 seconds to load www.nytimes.com . Pretty damn speedy."

Like most of the hands on testers she reported that she couldn't get the best handle on the GPS in the convention center, but was able to bring up a map of the San Fran area.

Gizmodo's Brian Lam had these first impressions regarding the iPhone 3G: "In my hand, the 3G iPhone is lighter, fits better, and noticeably thinner feeling as it doesn't have the same squarish shape. (You won't notice that it is thicker at all.) I made a call with it, side by side with my 1st generation iPhone, and the reception is noticeably better as well. I can't even believe this is frigging AT&T anymore."

He also described the white-colored phone as "very feminine" in appearance and said "Nothing much has been left unimproved."

Engadget's Ryan Block did some speed testing. "We did a quick data test -- at our location we went from 104Kbps on the EDGE iPhone to 215Kbps on the 3G model. 2x ain't bad, yo."

Steve Jobs' on-stage demonstration showed a 2.8X speed improvement.

Regarding the feel of the unit, Block said: "It's certainly thicker feeling, but they rocked it Treo-style and really tapered those edges, so it just doesn't feel that different. But because of that curved back, it'll dance around on your table a little more than your completely-flat original iPhone. The plastic back didn't feel too cheap. In fact, it felt pretty solid. It's very glossy, so it'll pick up fingerprints just as well as the glass up front (yay)."

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