The iPhone 3G is pretty much the archetype for all modern smartphones, but it's still not a pleasant experience by modern standards. Contra the "firmware bloat

The iPhone 3G is pretty much the archetype for all modern smartphones, but it's still not a pleasant experience by modern standards. Contra the "firmware bloat is deliberately making old devices useless" argument, a 3GS on the original firmware is miserably sluggish and laggy. With modern eyes, you become painfully aware of how Apple used animated UI transitions to disguise a fundamentally very slow device. The original iOS 3.0 firmware is also strikingly primitive - at launch, the exciting new feature was copy and paste. 3G connectivity is woefully, miserably slow when you're used to 4G. A 480x320 LCD is visibly pixelated, even when it's only 3.5". It feels like peering through a broken telescope. There's no front-facing camera, the main camera is terrible, the battery life is atrocious even with a new battery, the GPS receiver takes an eternity to get a location fix. Try one out for ten minutes, try out the cheapest of contemporary Chinese smartphones and I guarantee that you'd prefer to keep the no-name Android phone.