iPhone News Updated

Review: Apple’s Speedy iPhone 3GS

Its blazing speed and new features make the 3GS Apple’s best iPhone yet, but its App Store, and easy-to-use OS are what set it apart from the Palm Pre and Nokia N97.

Advance reviews of the iPhone 3GS hit the Web just before the device launched on June 19. Most labeled the new smartphone from Apple “evolutionary, not revolutionary.” While I am inclined to agree with that basic sentiment, there’s actually a lot more going on here that deserves comment.

My colleague, Mitch Wagner, did a fine job reviewing all the new features of the iPhone operating system 3.0 (including cut-and-paste, Spotlight Search, voice memos, and remote wipe), so this review will focus instead on those refinements that are particular only to the iPhone 3GS hardware itself. First up, all the new goodies.

Camera And Video Capture

The most significant improvement of the iPhone 3GS over previous models is the camera. Apple has updated the 2-megapixel fixed-focus camera to a 3-megapixel camera with autofocus. The new camera takes better pictures all around. They are sharper, show more details, have less grain (noise), and are better exposed.

Pictures still are not perfect, but the iPhone 3GS does a great job for a phone. It will replace that point-and-shoot camera you may carry on vacation, but won’t replace a dSLR used for serious photography. It still lacks a number of features, such as white balance control and exposure control, and doesn’t offer advanced features such as bracketing and panoramic shooting.

The new touch-to-focus function is fun to use. If you want the iPhone to focus on a specific object in the viewfinder, simply touch that part of the screen and that’s where it will focus. It works quickly, shoots pictures fast, and returns to the image-capture screen in an instant. The result is sharper images. Apple says it improved the low-light performance of the iPhone’s camera as well. Based on images I captured in low-light situations, they are indeed improved. Apple did this without the use of a flash and instead by improving the camera module’s sensitivity.
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Readers weigh in on ATT, ad networks and the iPhone

ADOTAS — In our weekly poll, readers overwhelmingly said that Apple should not get rid of ATT, just add more carriers. Readers (some correctly, others not so much) also pointed out mistakes.

Karen Garcia:
“Just to clarify your final paragraph and your earlier statement that “The Legislature recently passed a bill forcing companies to collect taxes from online-marketing affiliates” this isn’t accurate. Neither affiliates nor merchants are the source of sales tax revenue. Affiliates collect no payments from the consumer and merchants merely collect and remit sales tax when required. Payment of taxes falls entirely to the consumer, which is in fact the crux of the problem. If you as a consumer make an online purchase from ANY retailer (not just Amazon) and you are not charged sales tax, you are required by law to keep track of how much you should have paid and remit the proper amount, called use tax, to the state with your income taxes. Although most states have had use tax laws on the books for a very long time, most consumers have no idea the law even exists, so the use tax goes unpaid and uncollected. States believe that by changing the definition of ‘nexus’ to force out of state merchants to collect the tax will solve the problem.

The main issue with that is two fold. First, nexus has already been defined by the Supreme Court in the case Quill v. North Dakota as requiring a “physical presence” within a state. Affiliates are merely advertisers. They are not sale reps or employees of the companies they place banners for on their sites. States want to redefine nexus to include this sort of commission based advertising, despite the fact that it goes against the pre-established definition. Second, affiliate relationships are at-will and most programs can remove all of their affiliates in a particular state with a few clicks. Without affiliates in a state with one of these new laws passed, there is no legal need for them to collect and remit the sales tax and for many merchants, a much simpler soultion than trying to implement sales tax across multiple zones. (Nationwide, there are more than 12500 sales tax zones according to Avalara.)
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