The iPhone 3G - A Blast from the Past

     On the 9th of June, 2008, Steve Jobs announces the iPhone 3G. A revolutionary device that now also has the capability of 3G. This was a really impressive thing back in the day, and my dad thought that as well, so he ended up buying one for himself. 

    I'm now the care taker of that original iPhone 3G, and sometimes, it's nicer to keep the iPhone around rather than my main smartphone to keep me away from all the distractions that it presents for a person. So, here's a review and a little bit of a story for this amazing device that I really enjoy to use from time to time.

    Starting off with the specs, it had the same 3.5" TFT screen as the original iPhone, and the one that I have comes with 16GB of storage and 128MB of RAM. The iPhone 3G also came with WiFi and Bluetooth support, which I personally love as you can connect the more modern bluetooth devices to the device and they still work like the device you're reading this blog post on. 

    Now, coming to the experience that I've had with it. When I was younger, my dad gave us this iPhone to have fun with, and you can probably imaging that we had a lot of fun with it. Over the years that we had access to it, either me or my brother took so many pictures on the device of really whatever we wanted to take a picture of, and it could be anything. At the moment, I live in the USA, and my home town is in India, so when we moved to the USA, we initially didn't bring everything from our house with us as there wasn't enough space, nor did we plan to move everything here at that time, so when we went back to India last summer, I made sure to bring all of the devices that I loved growing up with, including the iPhone 3G, but as it turned out, it's lifespan had ended. No matter how long I left it on charge, it just wouldn't turn on. Regardless, I took it with me as it still held a lot of memories in my heart, and I knew that it had a lot of memories on it as well.

    You might now ask, "if the iPhone was already dead when you got it again, how is it working now?" Well so you see, there's this thing known as repairing a device, which is exactly what I decided to do with it. During October of 2023, a.k.a my freshman year, I had a class in which I thought of utilizing the iPhone for, but since it was dead, I knew that I had to repair it myself. So, the first thing that I bought for it was a new battery, as the iPhone was really old, and batteries are usually the component that die off first. I open up the device using whatever way I thought was right, and I replace the battery. This time when I plugged it in, it did show some life, but it was barely, as it would show the charging screen for a couple seconds, but then it would just turn off, then it continuously repeated the cycle for the entire night that I charged it, and I lost hope at the time.

    Fast forward to February of 2024, I had some new found hope to revive the device. I realized that the faulty part might be the charging port, and so I order the charging port, but I ordered the wrong part, so I had to return it and order a new part that could replace not just the port, but the entire assembly that it sits in. I order that, and as soon as it arrives, I start repairing the iPhone.

    After I close up the iPhone, I leave it on charge for the night, hoping that the next morning when I check on it, it would work.

    Next morning comes, I get ready to head for school, and just before I leave for it, I remember to check on the iPhone, and what do you know, it was on! The amount of joy that I felt in that moment is indescribable, as it was my hard work, that I managed to revive such an old device when everyone else continuously asked me "why bother?"

    Coming back to the present, the iPhone works like a charm, and I always have it in my heart, as it's just a wonderful piece of tech within itself. It comes with everything you realistically need, without introducing any major distractions to it. But, one thing that this iPhone introduced was the App Store, so people could make and download the apps that they most liked to their iPhone 3G. When my dad gave us this iPhone, I'm fairly confident that he removed a lot of his personal stuff, as now when you look at just the home screen, there's just all of the regular apps that you'd find on an iPhone 3G home screen, just with 3 extra games that my dad installed for us so that we won't be completely bored (trust me, we weren't iPad kids of that time.) Seeing how old the device is, you would expect for it to run really slow, but I was surprised with how snappy it feels considering its age. You can nip through the home screens with lightning speed, but you can feel its age when you start to open an app. In today's age when you open an app, you expect it to present its' content to you immediately, but since the iPhone is so old, it takes an extra second or two to load the app you clicked on, and it might also occasionally freeze up on you if you try to do too many things at once.

    Wow that's a lot of reading, but thanks for reading through my blog! If you enjoyed reading it, then please comment about it, and if you didn't like something in particular, you may also put that in the comments so that I can learn and improve the quality on these blogs. Thank you!