iPhone 3G Review Addendum: iPhone GSM Buzz Gone, More Software and App Foibles [IPhon

[Leecher]

Everyone at Giz has continued to test hardware and software in the iPhone 3G over the last week and we've updated our reviews with the following nuggets:
• Speaker Buzz: We've finally confirmed that the dreaded buzz you got with speakers and tape adapters too close to the iPhone with the GSM connection running during calls or data disappears when you're running 3G. (Thanks Damien for helping with testing.)
• Battery Life: gets murdered by 3G and 3D gaming. Here are hardware and software fixes.
Software:
• Safari has a new function that automatically types .net and .org domain suffixes.
• Safari also shows embedded YouTube videos on webpages as stills that link to the YouTube app.
• A lot of the apps aren't incredibly stable. Developers only had a couple months of play time with the platform, so stuff isn't nearly as stable as it could be. Most of the time when an app crashes it won't take down the system, but we've had our share of having to hold down the power and home buttons simultaneously to hard reboot.
• Apple hadn't really allowed developers to chat with each other because of the NDA, so they couldn't share notes on how to do this function or that function in a smart way. So, the quality of apps will go up starting now.
• Only about 20% of the apps are good. I'm not sure what people were expecting from the iPhone App Store, but like any open or semi-open development platform, there's going to be a lot of garbage apps that either aren't well made or are so niche that only a handful of people would use them. This is like that.
• Because Apple has to hand-review every update to the App Store, it takes forever for developers to patch their software. Many apps like NetNewsWire have a handful of point-releases that fix bugs already done, but are waiting on Apple to approve them.
• The "backup" portion of a sync takes a really long time if you've just made any changes to your applications. iTunes is taking a snapshot of your phone for restoring purposes (you get all your apps back when you do a restore). So keep that in mind if you want to do a really quick sync and get out the door.

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