iOS 6 on a 3GS. My Review.

 Now remember, this is for an iPhone 3GS. The phone is now discontinued by Apple, and it is three plus years old. I am very pleased but surprised this phone can handle this operating system update. This blog is about my experiences only. This is not a guide on how or if you should do it.


 So as you all know the iPhone 5 was released. And as you know that means a new update for iOS. This time it was iOS 6. I normally skip these updates because I hear they don't work very well with the 3GS. Yes I know, I know, it's time to update, and upgrade phones. I'm working on it.

Left is the last version of iOS I had. Right is iOS 6. Notice the color scheme is different in 6 compared to 4.

 Well I said screw it. (and thinking there was a problem with our phones and with our messages long story that needs not be said) I decided to jump into the update process. I plugged the phone in to iTunes, and started the backup. Then I started to update. It actually only took 35 to 40 minutes per phone. My friend said his iPhone 4, took an hour. I don't know if that was over the air or not? Our phones hadn't been updated since 4.3.5 so we didn't have iCloud or over the air updates. Well after the update process all seemed OK with the phones. I started playing with my phone to see all the updates. I was reading about iOS 6 before the update so I knew a little bit about it.

 After I updated my phone I noticed that my songs were gone. I downloaded those from iTunes that I had purchased at home. That didn't make sense to me. I lost a picture older I had uploaded from my computer. I don't know if that was because I used a different computer for updating, or because of iOS 6? The available space has gone down in my phone since the update also. That's not a big deal for me because I don't have a lot of apps, but I know other people live for apps so space is a premium.

 iMessage.
iMessage was turned on by default. We have a text plan so we don't need to use iMessage. I sent a quick text to a person from my wife's phone, and they asked why it was me Ben using Melissa's phone. Well in iMessage (Can I just say for the record this lowercase "i" before everything pisses me off and annoys me so I'm stopping.) When you have a set email address in itunes imessage uses that persons name even though you have two phones, hence my name showing up on my wife's imessage. I turned off her imessage and all was fine. You have to set up a new account to use that name as your caller id for imessage. Confused yet? Needless to say since we don't need imessage, I'm not setting up another account for Melissa's imessage. Maybe later and if she wants it.

 Icloud.
This feature is great. It saves all of your contacts, camera roll. app information in the "cloud". Well I promptly backed up, and synced both out our phones to the icloud account that came with my itunes account. Well heres the first second problem I encountered. My contacts were inter mixed with my wife's and vice versa. I started deleting the contacts that weren't mine. Low and behold I was deleting Melissa's contacts off of her phone. Well how could that be? It's synced to icloud. I did a quick Google search and found this was a common problem (I'm so glad I was in the loop. (being sarcastic). The fix. you have to create a new icloud account for ALL of your devices or they will all mix their contacts and content. But you can have one itunes account for apps and songs for all of your devices. Make sense? Nope not to me either.

 Well let's get to some new features.

 Text messages.
Text messages are green for sms text, and blue for imessage. Other then that not much has changed (to me at least). One feature I found see picture below. I had always hated when there was a paragraph text. I had to go back to the main messages window, then go back to see the full message. Now you don't have to. Put your finger on the screen above the send button and slide it down. Now its full screen!

Full screen with a slide down with your finger.

 MMS messages.
The only thing I have seen that has changed is the IMG name. Now it says .JPG or .PNG. That's cool to me.

 Photos.
I have noticed that the back and forward arrows are gone when you look at pictures now. They used to be near the message button. Now you have to slide the pictures with your fingers. That's fine but sometimes I liked the arrows.

 Message options.
This was cool to see. It seems like it will be easier to use your pictures how you want to.

 Photo editing.
I belive this was available in a previous ios update but I'm not sure? I like how it added thes little fixes. Therefore you don't have to take a picture, save it, and launch a new app for just a crop or red eye removal. I wish panorama mode was available on the 3GS but I totally get why it's not.

 Photo albums.
I was excited for photo albums because then I could finally make a "beach" or whatever album. Yes you can but, and that's a big BUT you move pictures over to your new album, but it keeps the picture in the camera roll and bascially creates a copy in the new folder. That to me is not what I wanted so I won't be using that. Hopefully Apple can fix that later? Then another thing, when you go to delete your picture from the camera roll, it asks if you want to delete it everywhere.

A copy of my picture in the test folder from my Camera Roll.

Trying to delete the picture from my camera roll.

 Battery.
My battery has been going faster then it was before I did the update to ios 6. Now I do have to say I have been sending a lot more pictures and messages then I was because of this blog for instance. I need more time to see how it really is. The fourth day using my phone with the new os the battery is lower then before. I could get 50 percent out of my battery in a typical day. Now I'm using 75 percent of my battery for the same use.

 Well this is not as long as I wanted it to be but I think I hit on some points for the 3GS at least. I hope this helps you in deciding to update or not. For me I think it was worth it. It gave me extra functionality out of my phone. Till next time.