Behind the ballyhoo obscuring Apple’s iPhone (4 GB $499, 8GB $599) is possibly the most exciting personal communications device ever. True, many smartphones include a cell phone, music and video player, internet connectivity, digital camera and email, but none with iPhone’s joie de vivre. It’s a smartphone that’s fun to use.
More importantly, no other smartphone is an iPod. An intuitive music player is hard to do. By contrast, a cell phone is relatively simple. Yet other smartphones start with the simple function – cell phone – and attempt to graft the more difficult device – music player – on top of it. It’s like trying to turn an office into the White House. Apple has started with an iPod (and other difficult stuff) and added the simple cell phone.
But Apple has gone way beyond simply reversing the standard smartphone design philosophy. Start with the iPhone’s spookily responsive 3.5-inch glass touch screen. You need to remember only five finger movements: tap (select), flick (scroll), drag (move), pinch (zoom out) and reverse pinch (zoom in). iPhone reacts to your touch as if you’re actually manipulating objects in the real world. Finger flick through your contact or iPod song list, for instance, and the names spin by quickly then gradually slow as if you’ve spun a real wheel.
Then there’s the astoundingly uncluttered interface. iPhone has no pull-down menus. All the options you’ll need are clearly labeled around the child picture book simple screens or are a tap away. Apple’s Safari browser and full HTML email give you the same Web pages and graphic-filled communiques you get on your desktop.
iPhone’s screen is as smart as it is beautiful. Photos and video look almost three dimensional. When you turn the phone on its side, images and Web pages automatically re-orient themselves and zoom to fill the screen. When you swing the iPhone up to your ear, the screen automatically shuts off. Bring it back down and it eerily comes right back to life.
Visual voicemail, perhaps iPhone’s most useful wrinkle, displays your phone messages in a list. Just tap on the message you want to hear. You don’t even have to dial into the system first. “Why didn’t anyone think of this before?” is the typical first reaction.
Amongst iPhone’s twelve “widgets,” little mini-applications arrayed on the home screen, is one for YouTube. You’ll spend battery-burning hours surfing through featured and most-viewed videos or search for a favorite. Speaking of the battery, iPhone’s eight hours of talk time is nearly twice as much as the most efficient smart phone cell. You also get six hours of WiFi Web surfing, seven hours of video watching and 24 hours of music listening.
iPhone has myriad minor hiccups (for one thing, you’ll fill up that 8 GB quicker than you think), many of which are likely to be corrected via software upgrades, and one un-upgradeable doozy. iPhone’s WiFi lets you connect to any hot spot for zippy Web access. But if there’s no WiFi, Web surfing is crippled because iPhone accesses only AT&T’s sluggish EDGE network, not its broadband-like HSDPA system.
As a phone, iPhone’s earpiece doesn’t produce as much volume as we’d like and sound is often muddy with too much ambient noise leaking through, and ringtones aren’t very loud. And iPhone’s recessed headphone jack forces you to use the included stick earbuds. Thankfully, better iPhone-ready phones are due from Altec-Lansing, Etymotic, Sennheiser, Ultimate Ears and LTB that we know of, and likely from others. But iPhone is more than the sum of these pros and cons. It’s one of those rare devices that not only lives up to but surpasses its hype.
I’d add the battery issues to your hiccup list. Seems we are going to be replacing batteries on these things a lot sooner than we’d like to. I got a great replacement ipod battery from ipodjuice.com a while back and just saw that they are already adding a replacement iPhone batteryto their site.