Apple Thoughts: The iPhone 3Gs is Here: My First Impressions

Of course, the most important hardware upgrade is the one made to the camera which now includes video recording, and a 3.2 megapixel sensor with autofocus. The tap function to autofocus is absolutely brilliant in practice. In fact, it's one of those things that's like "damn, why didn't someone else think of this?" I hope at some point Canon or Nikon adopts the idea, too. Nikon is already making consumer level cameras with a touch screen, so it wouldn't be a big leap. Here's a sample shot...

And of course with this new camera comes video ability and the quality is very good. It's not on par with the quality from a smartphone like the Samsung Omnia (which shoots brilliant HD video), but it is quite comparable to the Nokia N95 which, for the longest time, was the standard for video on mobile phones. The iPhone shoots video at 640 x 480 x 30 and video is crisp and the colors are well-saturated. As could be expected, the quality in low light suffers, but no more than you would expect from the integrated sensor in a phone's camera. Below is a sample of the video from the iPhone 3Gs.

Overall, the improvements to the camera are quite noticeable. The one thing that lingers is the abysmal launch time and write time after taking a picture, but at least the quality of the camera makes the wait worth it.