The camera functionality in the iPhone has always been one of my most used features. iOS5 brings some enhancements, which are listed below:

Camera improvements

• Double-click the Home button when device is asleep to bring up a camera shortcut on iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch (4th generation)
• Volume Up button to take a picture
• Optional grid lines to line up shots
• Pinch to zoom in the preview screen
• Swipe to camera roll from preview screen
• Tap and hold to lock focus and exposure; iPad 2 and iPod touch (4th generation) only support exposure lock

Photo improvements

• Crop and rotate
• Red-eye removal
• One-tap enhance
• Organise photos into albums

This list was taken from the official release notes, which were accessible via iTunes pre-installation.

Thanks, Steve.

1. Flickr web application

The official iPhone client, and the best. m.flickr.com

2. Exposure

The Exposure webapp has a great feature called “Close To Me” which, predictably, shows you Flickr photos taken close to your current location. Scarily accurate, even on non-GPS iPhones like mine. Grab it from the iTunes Store: Exposure.

3. CameraBag

A webapp which applies filters to the photos taken with the iPhone’s crappy camera and makes them beautiful. Grab it from the iTunes store: CameraBag.

4. iPhone screenshots

iPhone OS 2.0 introduced the facility to take screen grabs: Simply hold down the home button and press and release the power button on top of the phone. The screen will flash, and a screen grab will be saved in your photos.

5. Send iPhone camera photos to Flickr

A very simple way of sending your iPhone photos to Flickr is via e-mail: Flickr allows you to set up a dedicated @photos.flickr.com address for your account. Go onto Your Account on Flickr and click the Email tab. Your Flickr upload email is listed on this page. Save this to your address book and use the Email Photo option to send the photo to this address.

Very nice iPhone specific version of Flickr

m.flickr.com

Today, Yahoo have released a beta iPhone application called oneConnect. One of the cool features is Pulse, which shows you status updates from your friends on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Very handy.

Yahoo! oneConnect™ for iPhone. A new way to stay in touch.

“Bug fixes” really doesn’t tell me a lot; a link to a page explaining what these fixes are would have been useful.

• Native applications
• Cisco IPSec VPN support
• MobileMe
• Improved mail client
• Enhanced contact management
• Better battery life

and more.

Meaning the only differences between my iPhone and the 3G iPhone is:

• 3G
• GPRS

So it boils down to whether I want to pay £99 for these two features. And I don’t: they are nice options, but far from essential. 3G is faster than EDGE, but for general browsing of websites I don’t think it will make a huge difference, especially because many sites serve up optimised iPhone pages already. Furthermore, enabling 3G on the phone will zap the battery faster than when using EDGE. And GPRS, while a nice idea, is far from essential in my day-to-day usage of the phone right now.

iPhone 3G

So what it boils down to is whether you think it’s worth $199 up front — plus $15 extra per month for the new data plan with SMS — for faster cell network data.

The iPhone 3G Upgrade Question

Settings -> General -> Network -> Data Roaming

Furthermore, make sure that auto-checking of email is disabled:

Settings -> Mail -> Auto-Check

Finally, turn off visual voicemail before you travel:

Dial 1760 to switch the divert to voicemail off and dial 1750 to switch on the divert to voicemail.

Travelling abroad with iPhone: usage and costs