Review: Apple iPhone
The iPhone is indeed the best iPod Apple has ever made. As revolutionary as the clickwheel was, it simply can’t compete with the iPhone. You can flip through your album covers, which as a vinyl aficionado is the closet thing to flipping through records I’ve ever encountered. The iPhone also lets you scan through your collection by letter, which was the one feature that was sorely missing on the iPod.
As a browser, you’re a little limited by the screen size, but you quickly get used to zooming in when you need to and dragging pages around to see what you want. Again, being able to flip into landscape mode gives you quite a bit of flexibility with the display. I love the fact that the iPhone uses WiFi if it’s around, and switches to AT&T’s Edge network when it isn’t. Sure, the 2.5G network isn’t the fastest available, but at $20 for unlimited data transfer, it’s a great deal.
And that data transfer includes email. I didn’t have to do any configuration—iTunes automatically pulled all my account information from Apple Mail (asking permission along the way) and set up my iPhone email. One thing to note is the quickest the iPhone will check your email is once every 15 minutes. If you’re the type that needs your email delivered the second it is sent, the iPhone is not for you.
On the other hand, because of the unlimited data plan (and the home screen icon), you can watch YouTube videos on your iPhone. This is interesting, because as we all know YouTube uses Flash video, and the iPhone can’t play back Flash video. So essentially what you get is a "best of" collection of YouTube videos, specifically transcoded for the iPhone. As reported elsewhere, this is pretty addictive—and I’m not a YouTube fan.
Another feature I like is that it treats text messaging as a conversation. In fact the SMS interface looks and feels like iChat. This is great for when someone responds to a text message a few hours after the original and you’ve forgotten the original context. On the iPhone, the context is preserved.
What else is there? Oh yeah, the phone. It does that, too, and with the same UI paradigm. Flick through your contacts, or scroll by letter. Tap to talk. You can dial using a standard number pad if you need to. You can keep your favorites in a separate list. But then there are the extras that go beyond what phones normally do.
For example, all your recent calls are kept in a single list. All missed calls are color coded in red, and with a single tap you can display only the missed calls. If you get a call from a number that’s not in your contacts list, a reverse area code lookup is automatically done. So now you know that where those mystery phone calls are coming from, which gives you a clue as to whether they need to be responded to or not.
And of course there’s the much-touted visual voice mail. I don’t get too many calls on my mobile phone, and I generally answer them, so I haven’t had much interaction with this, but the whole non-linear approach makes you realize how primitive regular voicemail is, and that you never want to work that way again.
It’s Not Perfect... But It’s Close
Before you write this review off as an exercise in gadget worship, let me say that there are things about the iPhone that aren’t quite there. The camera, for example, isn’t great. If your phone is your main camera, forget it. There are plenty of other phones with better cameras built in. Battery life is an issue. As a phone and an iPod, battery life is impressive, but if you start using the internet and keep that fabulous display lit up, you’ll need to charge it every night. The default browser view squeezes the entire page into the display, which for virtually every site is far too small to read. The keyboard is tight, particularly in email and SMS mode, which makes typing a little tricky. The predictive text mitigates most mistakes, so that I’ve found my typing speed steadily picking up.
And of course there are the questions. Will the iPhone support Flash video playback? Windows Media? How do you develop applications for the iPhone? Apple’s current answer is "Safari," but is that a sustainable long-term strategy? I’m all for Apple maintaining a firm hold over the experience when it results in something as fabulous as the iPhone, but the internet is a shared, open resource, and since the iPhone is intimately tied to the internet, it will have to open up to survive. Let the community decide what works and what doesn’t work on the iPhone. I’m eagerly awaiting the iPhone hacks website.
The iPhone is by no means perfect, but for version 1.0 it comes remarkably close. The sheer joy of interacting with it must be experienced to be believed. The most astonishing thing is how intuitive, and dare I say addictive, the user interface is. Just yesterday, I walked up to an iMac display in my local Apple store, and started tapping and dragging on the screen. I was confused for a moment until I looked down and saw the mouse, which suddenly seemed ridiculous. It’s as if we’ve been operating computers via pulleys and levers for the last twenty years.
During my recent trip to Europe grown men were close to tears as I ran it through it’s paces. And it’s not just men—women were just as likely to say "I’ve got to have one." Yesterday, in the Apple store, everyone in line was buying an iPhone, and they were all female. This is not a passing fad. It’s a phenomenon, and one that will have far-reaching effects on not just mobile telephony, but how we interact with portable devices, media, the Internet, and ultimately, dare I say it, each other.