Joshua Ochs, in a comment to the article “iPhone for Newbies: Honey, I shrunk the manual” on TUAW:

Do you sit down and read the manual, or refer to it when you need help? If it’s the latter, online resources – whether included help or googling – would serve you far better. And for a device like the iPhone, there’s no argument that you don’t have online access. If it’s the former, then it’s a sign of an especially bad user interface. If the program needs a manual, I consider it poorly designed from the outset. The last manual I used was for Microsoft Word 6.0, and if that doesn’t say something about both manuals and Word 6, I don’t know what does.

“duane robinson” offers a better solution:

Most users do not realize that the manual is also saved as a bookmark for your convenience in Safari. It is called the User Guide and it is a very handy web app. For even more convenience you can save it as a web clip and access it any time right from the face of the phone.

Firemint Real Racing for iPhone review by Chris Holt, Macworld.com – “Though it sounds blasé to say it, the prettiest girl at the ball gets the most dances. Real Racing is real pretty, and man, can she move. Real Racing has some of the most beautiful and cleanest graphics we’ve seen for the iPhone. The cars are rendered with believable detail and the environments, though similar, are fairly realistic.”

Copy and Paste

★ Copy and Paste – John Gruber, on blogging with the iPhone to his Movable Type-driven website, Daring Fireball:

And but then what about creating additional links within the body of the entry? In those cases I was stuck doing it the pain-in-the-ass way. More often than not, I’d just not add any additional links to the entry, even if I wanted to.

And blockquotes — cited passages from the page being linked to — were pretty much out of the question. Without copy-and-paste, the only accurate way to quote even just a few sentences from one web page and insert them in the DF entry would have been to transcribe the passage by hand with paper and pen, then re-type the passage on the iPhone.

The copy-and-paste implementation in iPhone OS 3 has put an end to that. It’s everything I hoped for, and I use it all the time.

The screen

John Gruber says:

“Oleophobic” screen works. Remarkably smudge-free. Has a slightly different feel, though.

The iPhone 3Gs’s oleophobic coating doesn’t make your fingerprints magically fade away (Jason Snell, MacWorld) – “What it does is create an oil-repellant surface that’s easily wiped clean. When I handled an iPhone 3G and an iPhone 3GS with similarly oily hands—olive oil, if you must know, from a pizza I was making—I was rapidly able to dump my grubby prints all over both devices’ touchscreens. After I rubbed the iPhone 3GS screen onto my t-shirt’s right sleeve, it was perfectly clear. In contrast, rubbing the iPhone 3G’s screen on my t-shirt’s left sleeve seemed to leave a thin film of oily residue spread uniformly across the entire surface, rendering everything a bit hazy.”

Image quality

One Reason Why I bought the New iPhone – Guy Kawasaki compares the new and old iPhones for close-up / macro shots – the degree of improvement in shots you get with the new 3G S is staggering.

The movie / video capture mode

Compared with the Flip Camcoder? TechCrunch says:

The new iPhone takes very good video (640 x 480). That isn’t as good as the Flip (not yet anyway, word is that it actually can shoot HD video but is being slightly crippled), but it’s still able to shoot perfectly good videos on the go (example), which is exactly what the Flip is for. And the iPhone has something that the Flip will never realistically have, cellular and wifi connectivity that lets you upload your videos immediately. No need to sync back with your base computer to edit the video and upload it. You can do basic editing right on the iPhone, and publish it to YouTube immediately. As an added bonus, that video can be geo-stamped via the phone’s GPS capability.

Audio quality during movie capture – The sound in the linked clip (watch it in High Quality on YouTube) seems to be of pretty good quality.

Justin Drumming – Awesome sound quality.

iPhone 3GS Review by Chris Pirillo – Recorded on the iPhone 3GS itself, and uploaded directly from the phone to YouTube with no further editing. I have to say it again – amazing audio quality, Chris’ voice is very clear.

New iPhone Good Enough For The Evening News – Tech-savvy producer Gio Benitez put the video camera to use and shows viewers what the technology is capable of doing (watch the video).

Gio says: “The quality of the video and sound was impressive on the phone, but I figured it would be less appealing when put on TV. Again, I was wrong. I plugged the phone into my computer and iPhoto popped up with all of my videos. I “dragged and dropped” the videos into Final Cut Pro and I was ready to edit. No advanced techniques needed to extract the video.”

“Sure enough, as people walked by my edit suite and looked at the video, they thought it was shot with one of our more “professional” cameras. The quality had not suffered in the transfer to a TV screen. It was remarkable.”

“Little known fact: I also used the iPhone’s “Voice Memos” application for my voice-overs. The story really was entirely shot using an iPhone.”

How to Upload Videos to YouTube from iPhone 3GS – SuzieQTv’s 6:52 tutorial.

Speed

Speed Test: iPhone 3GS Even Faster than Apple Claims – Medialets:

Apple has made claims that the iPhone OS 3.0 yields significant performance gains on the 3G model, and that the new 3GS can accomplish the same tasks up to twice as fast as its predecessors. Anecdotally, the new 3GS definitely “feels” faster under certain conditions. But how do Apple’s devices and OS versions really compare to one another? And perhaps of even greater interest, how does the latest hardware from Cupertino compare to smart phones recently released from other vendors?

The following graphic by Medialets show comparison figures SunSpider v0.9 Benchmark results pitting the iPhone 3GS vs.

1. Safari 4.0.1 on a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo White MacBook (the MacBook results were used as a baseline for relative comparisons).
2. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS v2.2.1
3. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS v3.0
4. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3GS with iPhone OS v3.0
5. The “Browser” app on the T-Mobile G1 with Android OS v1.5 (Cupcake)
6. The “Web” app on the Palm Pre with Web OS v1.0.2

The whole iPhone experience is more seamless (PC Magazine) – “The results are very impressive. Boot time has dropped from 47 seconds with the original 3G to 20. Launching the New York Times app takes 8 seconds—it used to take 22. Google Earth’s start time has dropped from 24 seconds to 15. Opening the weather app needs only 1 second, down from 4. Action games such as Need for Speed Underground feel easier to play, with no stuttering and much smoother controls.”

S is for Speed (AppleInsider) – “With the much faster new processor, graphical trickery isn’t as necessary. Existing iPhone apps now launch and work much faster, particularly more complex apps like games. Safari browses the web rapidly, loading pages a bit quicker but rendering them must faster. The original iPhone was pretty decent, the new iPhone 3.0 boosts performance quite a bit, but the new iPhone 3G S hardware really smokes when opening up web pages. It’s the fastest phone on the market. You’ll feel like you’re browsing from a full sized notebook.”

Encryption

Remote Wipe (AppleInsider) – “Your data stored within the iPhone 3G S is now kept in an encrypted image similar to FileVault. If you keep your device locked with a passkey, thieves can’t recover its data even with sophisticated tools to pull the information from Flash storage. All they’ll get is a lockbox.

That also means the new phone supports instant Remote Wipe using MobileMe or the corporate tools Apple provides for business users. Previous phones can be instructed to perform a remote wipe, but it takes some time to actually purge all the data securely. Since all the data on the iPhone 3G S is already encrypted, wiping it clean only requires scrambling part of the storage.”

Should you upgrade?

Steve Jobs’ health and the iPhone 3GS
– Daniel Lyons of Newsweek on why he upgraded to the 3GS despite already being an owner of iPhone 3G, Blackberry, Nokia and Palm Pre phones:

Why did I do this? Well, the new iPhone has a faster processor than its predecessor, and a better camera, and it shoots video. It also has more memory, so I can carry around more songs or movies. But really, I did it because I trust that whatever Apple puts out will be worth the money. I did it because I always want to have the latest and greatest from Apple. You see, Apple and its loyal customers (like me) have made a deal: it’ll keep improving its products at a fantastic pace, and killing off its own products. In return, we’ll keep buying whatever it makes.

… and …

Let’s admit that Jobs is a royal pain in the neck. Most of us probably wouldn’t want to work for him, or live next door to him, or have to negotiate deals with him. He’s spoiled, and arrogant, and he has a terrible temper. But he’s also brilliant. Those lines at the Apple store today? Tim Cook didn’t create those. Neither did Phil Schiller, Apple’s marketing chief, or Ron Johnson, the retail boss who runs the stores, or even Jon Ive, Apple’s design guru. No, Steve Jobs is the one who gets those people to line up. He’s the one with the vision. He’s the one who inspires the fanboys.

Matt’s review of the iPhone 3GS – Matt Cutts says:

Should you upgrade? That’s something only you can answer. If you still have a non-smartphone or an original iPhone, it’s probably worth it. If you have an iPhone 3G (especially if you’re not eligible for the discounted upgrade yet), you might try OS 3.0 and see if that’s enough. I decided to get the 3G S and I’m glad that I did. I fill all sorts of idle moments with surfing, tweeting, and checking my mail. The iPhone 3G S makes all those activities much faster and more pleasurable. Overall I’m quite happy with my iPhone 3G S.

References

iPhone OS 3.0 Adoption Rate – Paul of Tapbots:

It’s somewhat early to draw an overall market conclusion from our single sample. It’s pretty clear that at least our customers are upgrading to 3.0 at an incredibly fast pace. We’ll be keeping an eye over the next couple weeks and will update this post as needed with newer numbers. As I said before we don’t currently have any plans to make Convertbot or Weightbot 3.0 only, though they both have been submitted to Apple with some minor 3.0 bug fixes (which are still pending approval). However, our third app will be 3.0 only, as will anything else we do after that. So if you haven’t upgraded yet, what are you waiting for?

iPhone: Which iPhone 3.0 software features does my iPhone support? (Apple support document) – “iPhone OS 3.0 is a free software update offering many new features for all iPhone models. Features and capabilities vary between iPhone models, with some features available only on newer models.”

Cost to build Apple’s new iPhone 3G S estimated at $179 – AppleInsider:

Apple’s component and manufacturing costs for its new 16GB iPhone 3G S falls within $5 of those required to build last year’s 8GB iPhone 3G, this despite a doubling of the handset’s built-in storage capacity and the addition of several new components, according to a new tear-down cost analysis.

Apple sells more than a million iPhone 3GS models for opening weekend, by Peter Cohen, Macworld.com – Peter:

The figure exceeds Apple’s sales of the iPhone 3GS’s predecessor, the iPhone 3G, during its opening weekend in July, 2008. It’s likely good news for Apple on Wall Street. Some analysts had predicted that Apple would sell fewer iPhone 3GS models, with estimates ranging from 500,000 to 750,000.

Flight Control for iPhone review by Lex Friedman, Macworld.com – “The game takes seconds to learn, and mere minutes to play. That makes it even more impressive that I’ve spent hours guiding planes in Flight Control and can’t wait to go play again.”

The comments to the review are also extremely positive about the game.