This morning I received my free iPhone 4 bumper case from Apple as part of their free case program. I'm not at all sure how they thought they could charge what they were charging before deciding to give them away. It's made up of pretty much nothing, just a little bit of shaped plastic. Anyway I put it on really just to see what it was like and if it would suit me. I don't have the antenna problem because I firstly don't hold my phone in the way you have to to cause the signal drop and also I have an invisible shield on which includes strips that go around the phone's edge.

Having had the case on all day I can say I don't like it. There are a few reasons for this:

• Doesn't feel right. The plastic is too smooth. It would be much nicer with a more rubbery texture.
• It makes the solid build quality of the iPhone 4 disappear because the bumper moves and flexes to much. 
• The shiny finish does seem to be for style but the edge of the iphone 4 is a brushed metallic look and this takes away from the look of the iPhone 4. Let's be honest the iPhone (and all Apple products) are a lot about image. The bumper just doesn't cut it with Apple normally great design.
• Doesn't fit right. I expected it to be an incredibly tight fit around the iphone but it's not. You can quite easily peal it off the iPhone and I suspect it wouldn't take much to do this is your pocket.
• Won't protect from scratches and scoffs from keys and coins.

It's not all bad. The case should give some protect if you drop it (not I'm not going to test it). It also stops the iPhone 4 sliding on smooth surfaces and that suction effect if the surface is really smooth. Finally, all the buttons are easy to use expect for the switch that turns sound on/off.

When push comes to shove I don't see myself keeping. It doesn't feel right, look good or provide protection from scratches. I'll stick with just the Invisible Shield. If you do have and use a bumper then I'd highly recommend getting an Invisible Shield.

The new iPhone OS 3.0 came out a few days ago and the new iPhone, iPhone 3GS (the S stands for Speed), came out today. I was thinking about upgrading to the 3GS untill I saw I'd have to pay the full £440.40 for the 16GB version or £538.30 for the 32GB verion. No subsidized mid-contract upgrade this time. Such a shame, I was hoping that it would be the same price for me as it is for new customers (£87.11-£274.23 depending on version and contract rate). If it had been I would have upgraded right away because EnviroFone are offering £180 for my iPhone and it wouldn't have cost me much, if anything at all. Oh well! I'm still very happy with the iPhone 3G and the combination of the new OS and Google Sync service has made it better.

iPhone OS 3.0
Well I upgraded the Operating System on my iPhone 3G on the 19th of June and I'm liking what I see. The main thing, for me, is MMS. Really MMS should have been in the iPhone from the start but it's here now (nice to see Apple doesn't forget customers after making the initial sale) and it works really nicely, exactly how I thought it would work.

The copy/paste functionallity is nice too. So far I've only used it to demostrate how it actually works but I can see plenty of uses for this, like copying a phone number from your contact into an email, text or something.

Search is another note worthy addition. Search on the iPhone searches pretty much the whole phone (calendar, contacts, apps, ...) and I like the way it works. I've found it's much easier to use search to find a contact than going into the contacts application.

The only other new feature that I might use is the voice memo app. I can imagine there's 100s of apps on the store that do this already, EverNote being the one I can remember, so I don't think it was really needed. Having said that it's very simple to use and if you just wanna make a quick voice memo it works a treat.

Apple claim something like 100+ new features have been added. But that's enough for now.

Unrelated to the new 3.0 software is Google Sync. I only found this recently but love it. It acts as an exchange server to sync your Gmail contacts and your Google Calendar. It's really good, although to be great it would need to work with your Gmail emails too. I'm sure Google are working on this and I'll be pleased when it comes!