You’re the proud owner of an Original or iPhone 3G, but you just can’t help but ogle your mates 3GS ever since he got it. With it’s fancy new compass, voice recognition and video recording, your Original/3G is starting to look a bit tired. Problem is, you’ve got at least another couple of months on your contract left and the networks are charging extortionate amounts for early upgrade. You could try buying a PAYG iPhone 3GS and sell your old and busted iPhone taking the hit on the difference, but that’s probably just as much as the early termination/upgrade fee O2/AT&T wants from you. So for the time being you’re stuck with an iPhone 3G.

OK, it’s not like that’s the end of the world, it’s still an incredibly capable device, plays some great games and can use almost all the apps that the 3GS can. But what about those features that set the 3GS apart? Well with a few apps and tweaks you too can get your 3G to do almost all of the new tricks the 3GS has and give your old trusty an extra burst of life.

First up, voice control. There’s not much in the new 3GS has that means it’s the only iPhone capable of using voice control, it’s just that Apple wanted to really set the 3GS apart from the 3G and Original iPhone with some unique features, voice control being one of them. Never fear though, because through the magic of the App Store your 3G or Original can also rock voice control. Vocalia, an app that essentially replicates the control and voice search functions built into the 3GS, is available for the pultry sum of £2.39. Featuring a HAL type eye which acts as your input button and indicator, the app translates your garbled speech into contact names, music tracks or even bookmarks. You can even use it just by lifting the phone to your ear just like the Google search app. With a quick vocalisation you can be calling your mate’s phone, playing an album, individual track or artist or browsing your favourite Geek site, at least that’s the premise.

Does it work? Yes, it does and pretty well. With a bit of prompting you can get it to narrow down and play whatever track you can remember, or pick any contact in your address book and call them. Is it useful? Simply put, No. I’ll elaborate on that a little, it’s as useful as any other speech recognition app for controlling computers or devices. Nine times out of ten, it’s easier and quicker just to reach over and hit a button. The voice control is the same on the 3GS, most people don’t use it because it’s not as quick as using your fingers and therefore is resigned to the ‘gimick’ side of things rather than being a real feature. The only exception I’ve found to the rule is the Google Voice search app, which normally saves me time, but even that I don’t use very often.

So don’t get me wrong, if you’re a fan of voice control then Vocalia works admirably, but I just don’t think it’s useful.

On to the second feature to replicate, Video recording. Now this one’s not quite as simple as just downloading an app. It’s not that it’s hard, but it certainly takes a little longer because to get video recording on your 3G or Original iPhone you have to jailbreak it. OK, before we start on this one, I have to admit I’m a huge fan of quite a few jailbreak only apps and features that Apple simply wouldn’t allow in the App Store. Whilst it is true that jailbreaking makes App Store piracy possible, it’s by no means the sole reason one would jailbreak their iPhone and so it’s unfair to label it with that moniker. With that bit of spiel out the way, I’d like to introduce you to Cycorder. Jay Freeman, the man behind many of the best jailbreak features and functions including Cydia, has authored a nice, free, ad-supported (pretty unobtrusively I might add) video recorder for the Original and 3G. While the quality of the recording is fairly limited by the relatively weak hardware available on the non-3GS iPhones, Cycorder makes the best out of it and in decent lighting you can get pretty good 15fps mobile phone videos out of your iPhone for free. We’re not talking movie quality here, but who really uses their phone for anything more than short clips of your mate bladdered out of his mind with a marker pen all over his face after an epic night out?

There are of course alternatives for pretty much everything on the iPhone and it would be unfair to talk about video recording and not mention Video Recorder for 3G. It’s billed as ‘a powerful iPhone orientated video recorder’ that can record to .mov and upload it to YouTube. Sounds great, but there’s a snag and it’s a pretty hefty $19.95 price tag. For the kind of videos you can actually get out of your iPhone I think $20 is pretty steep, especially when Cycorder gets the job done in a very Apple like, minimal fuss, maximum enjoyment kind of way.

So we come to the final feature that really stands out as being different between the iPhone 3G and the 3GS, the compass. OK, you’ve got a faster processor and slightly (and I mean slightly) better battery life, but the compass is truly something different. Unfortunately this is where software alone cannot make any difference. The onboard compass allows you to know which direction your facing (when it works) in the maps app and here’s where a little dosh can help iPhone 3G users out (sorry Original users I’m afraid the lack of GPS kind of rules you out of this one, mind you I understand raw skyhook isn’t all that bad if you can read road names). For the cost of a cheap cup of coffee, you can purchase yourself a handy dandy Pocket Compass, which combined with the Google Maps app should see you to your destination no problem.

OK, that doesn’t help you out with augmented reality apps I admit, but if you sense of direction is as shocking as mine, a pocket compass can really come in handy for a 3G user like myself. You’ll probably find that a decent pocket compass is going to work better than a magnetometer anyway.

So that’s it, now your iPhone 3G, and to some extent your Original iPhone, has almost feature parity with Apple’s latest and greatest. At least it should help some people stave off the massive upgrade charges that networks are asking for and give your portable friend of choice some extra longevity. Myself, I’m going to hold out till the 4th Gen iPhone gets released because for me, the 3GS was just a spec bump. I’m expecting something bigger out of Apple this time round.