The iPhone has arrived, and it’s everything it was cracked up (by Apple) to be. Contacts, music, calendars, photos, movies, YouTube browsing, Web-surfing, and it makes calls, too! Writing a review for this device could legitimately be anything from two words (“It’s great.”) to a 3,000 word opus on all of the nitpicky pros and cons, but I’m going to take the middle road and look at the broad picture.
The Cell Phone
Steve Jobs said that the killer app on the iPhone was making calls, and he’s right. This is in large part because of the very thing that had folks worried before the iPhone was released: Virtual controls. With virtual controls, every control you are presented with can be contextual, and that means you have everything you need at your fingertips.
For instance, once you dial a number, you are presented with choices for where you want to hear your audio. In my case, that’s “Jawbone Headset,” “iPhone,” and “Speaker Phone” (if you don’t choose, it defaults to the last method you used). These are big buttons in the middle of the screen, and they are clear and easy to read. Once you choose (or it defaults to your last choice), those buttons are replaced by a grid of six buttons that allow you to mute, add a call to conference, hold the call, see your contacts, change your audio source, or access your keypad. That truly is killer.
Finding contacts is easier than with any phone I have ever used. The list is easily scrollable, the text is large and easy to read (the size is changeable in your settings), and choosing a contact looks just like the information in Address Book in Mac OS X. That makes choosing which phone number you want to dial for your contact easy. Note that iPhone syncs contact notes for your contacts, as well as the contact information, something many people will find useful.
Taking incoming calls when you are on another line is also clear and easy to do. Contextual controls once again make this possible, and makes swapping or merging those calls easy, too.
Lastly, sound quality is as good as or better than any phone I have used, be it through the iPhone itself, through the included earbuds, or through the Jawbone Bluetooth headset. Reception is also superior, as I am able to make and recieve calls in places where I normally get complaints of my signal breaking up. That alone makes the iPhone rock in my book, as my mobile phone has long been my office phone.
I love the feature that allows me to visually pick which voice mail I listen to, as opposed to having to listen to them linearly. That’s a killer feature that I have little doubt will sweep through the rest of the industry as soon as Apple’s competitors can make it work.
The only negative I can name is the lack of voice-dialing, something Apple is hopefully working on adding. Without the tactile feel of physical buttons to push, dialing without looking isn’t possible. Combined with the lack of voice dialing and one-button speed dialing, this makes operating the iPhone while driving a car high on the list of Things Not to Do. As Dr. Mac pointed out to me, the cheapest of Bluetooth-enabled phones can voice dial, and Apple really should add this feature to iPhone.
I’ll also tweak the company for not allowing me to add my own ringtones, though it does come with several excellent-sounding ringtones. Still, there are plenty of annoying people who want to use pop songs for ringtones, and seeing as how iTunes is hooked deep into the iPhone, it should be a no-brainer for them to be able to use any song they want for a ringtone.
The Keyboard
The keyboard on the iPhone really does work. If you’ve watched the excellent keyboard-use video put out by Apple just before the iPhone’s release, you’ll find that everything in that video is spot on. The keys are easy enough to hit, and I have medium-sized fingers (sausage-fingers may find it more difficult!!).
I found my typing to be fairly accurate, but the cool thing is that the error correction suggestions are amazingly accurate. Indeed, the more I trusted the error-correction, the faster I got, and I dare say I could do live coverage of a Steve Jobs keynote from my iPhone if I really had to. I’d be a nervous ball of tension when it was over, but I could do it. I have no doubt that any bell curve for usability for the keyboard would skew towards younger users, but I think even the fogeys who want to text on this device will find it quite satisfactory.
One last note: There are three virtual keyboards on the iPhone, and one is easy to miss. There’s the default alphabet keyboard, a numeric keyboard with punctuation, and a third keyboard with special symbols (and some not-so special ones, too) that is accessed through a small button from within the numeric keyboard.
Web Surfing
Surfing the Internet on any handheld device has never been spectacular, and doing so on the iPhone isn’t spectacular either. It does break new ground on mobile usability, though, and I think Apple has truly given us a good mobile Internet. As promised, the version of Safari included with the iPhone is the real deal, and it renders Web pages faithfully and fully.
While the iPhone screen is too small for most mortal eyes to read the text on typical Web pages as-is, the two-fingered zoom (or zoom-out) gestures are easy to master. I found I was quickly able to adjust pages in such a way to make reading comfortable, and I have even found myself catching up on Google News headline stories as I was going to sleep at night.
Forms render properly, and are usable, as tested on our publishing system, a real estate online database I tested for a friend, and various and sundry other forms. This does require a lot of scrolling, side-scrolling, and zooming, but again the key is that the gesture controls Apple has built into the iPhone make this easy.
As long as you are on a WiFi network, Safari is much faster than you might expect, but slower than you might hope. On my network, for instance, Google News renders fully in about six seconds, and TMO’s home page in about 6.5 seconds. Apple’s home page took seven seconds to render. That will feel slow compared to any modern computer, but considering it’s not a “mobile version” of the Web, it’s pretty fast for a mobile device. The EDGE network is much slower, of course, but it’s nice to have a back up mode for getting on the Internet.
Note that I recommend turning the iPhone on its side (landscape view) for surfing, as the horizontal space tends to be more useful than the vertical space. You’ll do less adjusting as you read in this mode.
Calendars & Contacts
I love managing my contacts through my computer (something .Mac makes insanely easy for multiple computers, BTW), and I love being able to put those contacts on my phone even more. iPhone brings this to a whole new level by syncing everything in Address Book or Outlook/Outlook Express on Windows. This makes the interface for e-mailing or calling someone the same, and as noted above, having contact notes includes is just that much better.
Also as noted above, navigating through your contact database is easy, even if you have a ton of contacts. You can scroll through with a flipping gesture, or use the alphabet list on the right side to go directly to a particular letter. Lefties, please note that there is no preference for moving this to the left side of the screen, something you should ask Apple for!
On the negative side, iPhone doesn’t currently offer ToDo lists. This seems a glaringly silly ommission for a device that is otherwise such a killer PDA, and I hope Apple adds this feature sooner, rather than later, in a software update.
Running one’s e-mail on iPhone is painless to set up, but it will take some work for some users to be comfortable. All of my e-mail accounts were moved over for me by iTunes, but that didn’t include any of my e-mail folders. That means all my mail was dropped into my main inbox on the iPhone, something that isn’t practical for me due to the absurd amounts of spam I get on a daily basis. I haven’t yet set up a full IMAP implementation of my e-mail, however, and we will have a dedicated review of this feature Soon.
Still, the e-mail client on iPhone is straight forward, easy to use, easy to read, and generally spiffy. As with making a call, the contacts list is easy to use. Either start typing and see a list of possible matches appear, or touch the “+” button to browse your address book in its entirety. Easy stuff. Typing a message is the same as using the virtual keyboard anywhere else, with the exception that you can’t compose an e-mail in landscape mode, something I think Apple should change.
iPod
Don’t forget music, as the iPhone is still part of the iPod family. Listening to music is everything you would expect from any other iPod device. Sound quality is good, the large screen for browing your music in coverflow mode is great, and it still makes phone calls.
The only thing I was surprised about was that there is no virtual scroll wheel on the iPhone. I had personally expected such a feature due to some patents filed in the last couple of years, but scrubbing and volume are handled through virtual slider controls. That’s not a big deal, unless you were hoping for some fancy virtual scroll wheels that matched the rest of the iPod family.
Still, the virtual sliders work, and no one will be unhappy with the iPhone as an iPod, unless you wanted to replace your full-sized iPod with it, or perhaps take it to the gym. with 4 or 8 GB of memory, you simply can only put so much music on it. To be fair, 6 GB of music is still a lot of music, but remember that some of that memory is taken up by the OS, your contacts, photos, and possibly videos you are also carrying. As for the gym, the iPhone was not designed to be a jogging mate, and most will find it too heavy for vigorous exercise.
Unlike any other iPod, iPhone has a speaker, which means that if you don’t care about quality, you can listen to music without earbuds or a docking station. This may be a mixed blessing, especially in public settings, but I’ve already found it useful for playing a video for someone else.
Video & YouTube
The built-in YouTube browser is terrific, and as I have repeatedly said throughout this review, easy to use. I wouldn’t choose to watch a feature length motion picture on my iPod, but then I wouldn’t refuse to do so, either. The display is simply fantastic, and that means that your videos will look good. In short, those who don’t mind watching videos on small screens will be delighted with iPhone as a video device, while those who don’t fancy watching movies on a small screen won’t be much happier with an iPhone than they are with any other device.
Design
The iPhone looks great, feels great in your hand, and feels solidly built (see PC World‘s Stress Test video for an idea of its ruggedness). Unlike iPods, the back has a textured surface that won’t collect fingerprints. The screen looks fantastic, but it can collect fingerprints and oils from your hands. Apple included a chamois cloth for wiping it clean, however, and there will likely be a host of accessories for cleaning your screen released in the near future.
Bottom Line
Apple did it! The company has made a phone that just works! I can’t tell you how delighted I am with that seemingly simple notion, and I look forward to the changes it will bring to the cell phone industry as a whole. The controls are easy to use, make sense, and the iPhone intelligently displays only those controls you need relating to the task at hand. It looks good, it sounds good, it feels good, and it makes phone calls easily and simply.
Still, it’s not perfect (voice dialing, ring tones, lefty prefs, landscape viewing not universal, and no To-Do lists), and so despite the fact that it is far superior to every other smartphone on the planet, I wouldn’t give it a perfect rating, but for anyone wanting even a tenth of the features the iPhone offers will love it, I recommend it heartily.
Bob LeVitus and Jeff Gamet contributed to this review.
began using Apple computers in 1983 in a high school BASIC programming class. He started using Macs in 1990 when the Kinko’s guy taught him how to use Aldus PageMaker, finally buying a Power Computing Power 100 in 1995. Today, Bryan is the Editor of The Mac Observer, and has contributed to the print versions of MacAddict and MacFormat (UK).
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