Apple iPhone Reviewer's Comments
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To put it simply, the iPhone was worth the wait. The ground-breaking iPhone is the best music cell phone invented and easily earns our “TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award” for music phones.
Technophobics will love this phone, there is absolutely no learning curve required to figure out how to get online, check email or make a call. If you can point, you can use Apple’s iPhone.
As you may know, this phone is only available for use with an AT & T service plan, but their data plans are extremely reasonable at about an extra $20 per month for unlimited data. The phone is also Wi-Fi enabled so you can enjoy super-fast Internet wherever Wi-Fi is available and it switches automatically so you don’t have to worry about complicated configuring.
There really is very little to complain about when it comes to the iPhone’s music capabilities, it has all basic phone features, plays music and displays video better than any other phone—and it makes you look cool.
Apple iPhone Screenshots. Click to Enlarge
Music Features:
The iPhone rules the music phone industry; it easily syncs up with iTunes and plays both iTunes formats and MP3s. Finding your tracks is beyond easy with this phone, you simply flick through the album covers with the ‘cover flow’ feature, tap the album you want to listen to and drill down to the song you want. It uses the same kind of docking connection as the iPod, so it will work with all kinds of iPod toys and accessories.
It has the ability to play streaming music but cannot download songs from iTunes directly, you have to use your PC or Mac for transfers. On-the-fly music downloads is a feature many Sprint users have enjoyed and hopefully iTunes will be able to accommodate this need for instant gratification soon.
According to pre-release reviews, the sound quality for music is amazing and the ear buds that come with the phone are adequate, and we expect third-party headphones will be out soon to offer iPhone users more options. When we tested the iPhone we found the sound quality to be adequate, but we were left wondering if all head phone types could fit into the headphone jack, since it is recessed. Before purchasing this phone for music you may want to see if it is compatible with your favorite headphones, if you are the type that thinks using your own headphones is a necessary feature.
Voice/ Text Features:
This cell phone includes all basic cell phone features such as text messaging, speaker phone, conference calling (up to five) and voice dialing. According to Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, the call quality was only “OK,” but that could be more of a network problem than a cell phone problem. It's hard to judge. When we tested the sound quality here in Ogden, Utah we found the sound quality to be a bit less than average.
The most wonderful, exciting and practical feature we got completely thrilled over is the visual voicemail. With visual voicemail you can view your voicemails similar to an email inbox. So you can actually sort through your voicemails and listen to just the ones you want and in any order. You can even back up the recording and listen to any part of the message without having to re-listen to the whole message. It also has threaded text display, so you can see an entire text conversation and easily stay on topic. Some other high-end cell phones offer this feature, but none of the other music cell phones we reviewed did.
We would have liked to have seen Multimedia Messaging (MMS) support with this phone. The iPhone depends on email functions to act in an MMS capacity; you have to send photos and other items through email and not as a message. We tried having a MMS message sent to the iPhone from a RAZR, when you recieve the message you cannot view it, instead you are referred to a website to view the image.
The iPhone also does not include 3G support, though 2.5G is more prevalent, 3G is faster and would have been a nice option, especially for outside the US. To transfer contacts you cannot just move your SIM card over, you have to manually put them in or transfer them from a computer based program like Outlook or Entourage.
Internet Features:
The iPhone uses a Safari type browser for web browsing which in our experiences worked exceedingly well. The phone has a huge 3.5 inch screen that displays full web pages and you can easily zoom in on an area of interest with a few taps of your finger. You can also just tilt the phone to look at web pages in portrait or landscape orientation.
As mentioned above, the iPhone can automatically detect and connect to a Wi-Fi connection. Otherwise you have to connect to the Internet through EDGE technology, which has been referred to as “like dial-up,” by Steven Levy of Newsweek. We are thinking that EDGE should be sufficient for basic email, but Wi-Fi might be better for advanced web browsing. We found that web pages did load about as fast as dial up or about like an older lap top connected to Wi-Fi, but that is typical for a cell phone. However, Google Maps loaded faster than what we expected.
This phone does not offer iChat or other IM ability. Again, we think Apple is expecting the text and email features to fulfill this function, which it can, but you may want to think a bit about how your friends want to communicate and then decide what features you need. If one of your friends sends you an MMS message, the iPhone will refer you to a website to view the file.
Lifestyle Tools:
This phone includes the basics, like a calendar, calculator, alarm clock and an airplane (or flight) mode. It also has an excellent map and travel tool that utilizes Google maps. With Google maps and the iPhone, you should be able to easily find restaurants, hotels or other points of interest in any city you are visiting. It does not however offer GPS tracking, so you can view maps but the phone cannot tell you where you are on the map.
In terms of software, there is not at this time software that you can install onto the phone. Apple is encouraging the development of browser based applications that may be able to fulfill traditional software functions in the future. Though Apple has added a Microsoft document viewer to the iPhone, which may help it a bit in the business arena, though you can not cut, paste or save the documents.
This phone has a 2 megapixel camera and a great photo organizer. You can also zoom in on images and reposition them quite easily. It can also play movies and video clips and it has a direct connection to YouTube. However, we really missed a video recorder on this phone, which seems to be a fairly standard feature in many other phones.
Technical Specifications:
The iPhone offers exceptional battery life, four or eight GB of flash memory and a powerful operating system. It also has a big, gorgeous screen that can display millions of colors.
Typically, high end phones are battery drainers, but the iPhone has a seven hour battery life for general use. Only the Sony Ericsson can even come close to hitting that time frame at 6.5 hours.
This phone is a bit wider than the other music phones, but it has a much larger screen, otherwise it offers a fairly typical height and weight. Nearly all interactions with the phone take place through the multi-touch screen, so gone are the days of typing your text messages without looking; if you use this phone you will need two hands and a clear view of the screen.
Compared to other music phones, this cell phone has the best internal flash memory capacity at 4GB or 8GB. But it does not have an extra memory slot. Most music phones do not offer more than a 2GB capacity, though some Sony Ericsson’s offer up to 4GB of storage.
Unlike other music phones, the iPhone offers a high-end operating system, it runs OSX. The screen offers two orientations and switches by turning the phone. Movies can also be switched between standard view and wide screen view with just a few taps.
One major problem with this phone is that the battery is expected to only last 300 to 400 charges, which means you might have to replace your battery once a year for about $80 plus shipping. If you are the type that cannot go without your cell phone Apple charges nearly $30 for a battery rental. It would have been nice if this information was readily available before June 29th.
Wow Score:
This phone adds as new level of WOW to the cell phone world. No phone on the planet has a user interface that even closely resembles the iPhone’s multi-touch screen and easy-to-navigate interface. There is no way that you can pull this phone out of your pocket and not immediately draw a crowd of curious onlookers, because nobody has seen a cell phone like this before.
Summary:
The iPhone is beyond innovative and strikingly gorgeous. If you are an AT & T customer, we cannot think of a single reason why you would not want to try this phone out.
©2008 TopTenREVIEWS, Inc.
