iPhone News Updated

iPhone 3G network coverage limited

iPhone 3G network coverage limited

The new Apple 3G phone works super fast on the AT&T 3G network. That’s the good news. The bad news is that network is limited in coverage. And the 3G phone seems to eat up the battery a lot faster than the old one.

I drove across the state Saturday, from my Oakland County home to Muskegon, where this morning I jumped on my bicycle for a six-day pedal to Traverse City on the annual Michigander Bicycle Tour.

Once I passed Novi along I-96, that 3G symbol on the top left of my iPhone screen was replaced by the familiar “E” that denotes the EDGE network, the capable, but much slower, AT&T wireless network to which the older models were restricted. The 3G network is at least twice as fast as EDGE.

I passed Lansing but the 3G symbol never showed up, though Lansing is supposed to be within 3G coverage. Maybe I drove through too fast. The 3G connectivity returned in Grand Rapids but dropped out about five miles west of town.

In Muskegon and Grand Haven, where we detoured to watch the sun set over Lake Michigan, the connection was four and five bars strong, but on the EDGE network.

Flint is supposed to also have 3G. I’m not sure about Traverse City, though I know AT&T expects to add those locations as they keep building out 3G to 350 or so cities nationwide by the end of the year. Right now, it’s in a little less than 300 cities.

The EDGE network — available pretty much everywhere, including Michigan’s Upper Peninsula — is fine. Not so much for surfing the Web, which 3G does very well, but for e-mail. I even used it to send some photos of the Michigander to a special Web photo gallery on the brand new Apple MobileMe site. You can see them all week as I send in photos from the ride at http://gallery.me.com/pcmike.

That gallery, and the MobileMe site, is a replacement of the .Mac online portal. It offers push e-mail, calendar and contact synchronization, online file storage and the very cool photo gallery. You can create as many galleries as you want, share them or make them public, and even let people download your photos. I’m going to do that for the Michigander, so riders I photograph can have their friends and family check them out and download the photos.

One more thing about the Apple iPhone 3G: It is a battery sucker.

I had mine fully charged when I left my house about 1 p.m. Saturday. By 9 p.m., after maybe 30 minutes of talk time, and eight hours of push e-mail being being delivered with the new Microsoft Exchange software and the Mobile Me service, I was down to only about 20%.

I will be surprised if this phone will get a full day’s (12 hours) use. Glad I have the car charger.

Meanwhile, there were some other pleasant surprises with the new phone, besides the nifty new MobileMe. I am delighted to find that the speaker is louder. I can actually hear my incoming calls ring now, something I had trouble doing on the old model.

The new iPhone 2.0 software upgrade — standard on the new iPhone 3G and sent down Friday as a free upgrade to the older iPhones — also allows mass deletion of e-mail, a huge convenience that was missing and the source of much frustration with the old one.

I’m on vacation this week on my bike ride. But I can’t help myself. I’m sure I’ll check in from somewhere along the road and blog more iPhone experiences. Feel free to ask questions under comments and I’ll do my best to answer them in future posts.

[Thanks: http://www.freep.com]