Our Reviews

For over two years, there had been  rumors about Apple’s attempt to create a cell phone. And it didn’t really spark my interest until Steve Jobs , presented it during a Macworld event in San Francisco. For those of you who haven’t watched Steve Jobs in action at Macworld, I strongly encourage you to check out this youtube video:-

Anyways , the iPhone is a widescreen video iPod with touch controls (the best one which Apple has ever shipped), a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device. It currently has 8 gigs of storage capacity. And here is what it looks like (taken from the photo gallery on Apple’s site):-

First of all, does this phone look as gorgeous as the picture? It sure does. One of the first things you might notice  is that there is just one plastic button on the face of the phone and thats the home button. Everything else is controlled by a wonderful multitouch interface , which is state of the art at this time. I’ll share my opinion about the three major products built into this device .

The Revolutionary Phone

This is what it looks like while you’re using the phone device. The interface is absolutely marvellous. I’ve been having trouble figuring out how to use various basic features in previous phones which I used …like speakerphone, adding calls etc. On the iPhone , all the frequently used features are easy to find . As seen in the picture most of them are large easy to read buttons . To get the dialpad, its just one push button away. To activate the speakerphone, another touch and boom its done. Contacts are arranged beautifully and sync with popular software on your desktop/dashboard  . Scrolling through contacts is just awesome with the flick of a finger. While browsing through the contacts, if you decide to make a call to one of them ….all you need to do is touch the phone number displayed on the contact and it starts dialing and brings up the screen showed in the pictures. Its just fantastic.  The call quality is good and I don’t have any complaints about that at all. The speakerphone could be a bit louder, especially if there is a lot of ambient noise – like in a shopping mall. But I don’t use the speakerphone a lot , so its ok. So in summary , I would say that the phone feature brings an interface that is outstanding and second to none. The call quality is good .

The Widescreen iPod with touch controls

The widescren iPod on the iPhone is just fantastic . Its the best music portable music player ever. Its got a gorgeous screen which has the highest pixel density ever shipped on an iPod before and this leads to outstandingly clear video. And the multitouch interface allows for full touch controls.Browsing through songs / albums is easy using the flick of a finger to scroll through. Tilt the phone horizontally and this brings out  one of the best features I’ve found   – the “cover flow” mode . In this mode, you can scroll through gorgeous album artwork which is similar to browsing through a stack of CDs and looking at their cover art. Touch one of the albums and the artwork rotates to show the songlist(like the back of a CD) after some very nifty animation. Touch the song on the playlist and it starts playing . Its just unbelievable. I believe that Apple has patented this mode and so you’ll probably never see this on any other music player even if it has a touch screen. So whats the disadvantage of this touch screen iPod. Well, if you’re not using the earphones which came with the iPhone, then if you want to pause/skip songs you would need to look at the screen , touch it to bring up the controls for volume, pause, skip etc and touch the appropriate button to skip/pause songs…..unlike the click wheel on other iPods, where you could feel and locate the appropriate place to push , without needing to look at it. This is especially useful if you’re jogging or engaged in some other activity. If you use apple’s earphones….then there is a special button on it , which allows you to pause or skip songs. So its not too bad. The other thing about this iPod is that the headphone jack is recessed , so it might not accept all types of headphones without a special headphone adaptor. This sucks too. Fortunately , my more expensive earphones don’t require the adaptor , so I didn’t need to shell out extra dough on that adaptor.  The last thing is that the whole phone has 8 gigs of storage , which is plenty for songs ….but not a whole lot for videos. I think a higher storage capacity is imminent on future models. This being said, I would say that this iPod is hands down the best portable music player out there at this time.

The Internet Communicator

The internet communicator features Safari , which is apple’s standard web browser. And in the US, it currently uses AT&T’s EDGE network or any wifi network . Safari on the iPhone is super easy to use.  Scroll by flicking your finger against the screen. You can also zoom in and out, using an action similar to pinching. Since the screen is a multitouch interface, it can recognize this. Pinch inwards to zoom out and pinch outwards to zoom in. Its that simple. You can also Tap the screen to zoom in and zoom out of sections of the page. Its a special feature built into safari. To type in URL’s , the touch screen qwerty keyboard pops up on demand whenever required and gets out of the way when you’re done. I think that the Safari web browser is really good . A couple of things which I observed…. AT&T’s edge network is a bit slow. Its ok for doing google searches and stuff, but complicated webpages take a while to load on EDGE. However, its super fast on wifi. So if you have access to wifi , its fantastic…..even otherwise its very useable.  I use the internet a lot on my iPhone and I’m mostly on EDGE …..so it isn’t bad enough for me to give up on it. Apple says that the faster 3G service requires power hungry 3g chipsets which suck the battery out of the phone. So thats why they decided to balance this for now using EDGE and also integrating wifi, which is super fast. The other thing is the lack of flash support . So those kinds of webpages may not show everything . But this may be fixed through a software/firmware update through iTunes.  So as I said, Safari is super easy to use on the iPhone and thats probably why I’m using it all the time. They say that 90% of iPhone users do use their iPhones to surf the web. However only 15% of other cell phone users surf the web on their phones ….so that says something about the web experience on the iPhone as compared to other phones.

And a few more things to add:-

Google Maps

There is a separate application for google maps which is just unbelievable.Its easily accesibly on the home screen . You can get driving directions just as you would on the google maps webpage on a desktop. However, here’s the best part. If you’re looking for the nearest blockbuster , you can do a google search on google maps. And thats not all ….once it lists all the locations , it can give you directions on how to get to one ….or ….touch the phone number on the blockbuster which you’re interested in , and the phone will automatically kick in and dial the number for you. thats sweet. Inspite of being a Garmin GPS fan, I can tell you that doing a search on a portable GPS device is much slower than doing a google search on google maps on the iPhone . Once GPS is integrated into the iPhone, I think it will send spell danger to the portable GPS industry ….thats for sure….unless they all start using google.

Photos

There is a fantastic photo application, easily accesible on the home screen, which I guess comes from Apple’s OS . Browsing through photographs is great. You can get from one photo to the next,  by just sliding you finger as you would browse through real paper photographs.  I love this application and constantly sync my iPhone with my favourite photographs to share with family and friends. I think its a great way to share photos. The only complaint I have is about how I get the photos onto the iPhone. It requires the photos to be first stored on my desktop and then synced with iPhone. So if I take a picture with my digital SLR, I can’t pop out the card and insert it into the iPhone and directly copy the picture. There are no media slots. The only way is through iTunes . Getting songs on the other hand is easy ….instead of purchasing a song from a store or iTunes on your desktop, you can use the iTunes wifi store to purchase songs directly onto your iPhone. It gets added to your collection on your desktop the next time you sync your iPhone with iTunes. But getting the songs out of course requries iTunes again ….no option to store them on portable media like SD cards etc.

Youtube

youtube is built into the iphone as a separate application thats always accesible on the home screen. And its not all that great on EDGE, but on wifi , its super clear and fantastic. I would say that in wifi mode , youtube looks  clearer on my iPhone than on my 19″ Sony LCD flatpanel monitor .

Conclusion

That being said, I think I can conclude by saying that I love the iPhone . Its a fantastic device which will change the whole phone industry. I’m really happy with mine and can strongly recommend it to family and friends . I think the device which the current iPhone needs to be afraid of ….is probably its successor , the next generation of iPhones.