Apple's iPhone: an initial (but in-depth) review - Page 2

Oops, looks like the "South Korean iPhone customer market uptake expert" got some basic facts wrong......

Drool. Just think of how they could do this --visually--. Watching text squish together and disappear ...

Has anyone figured out whether/how "On The Go" playlists work on the iPhone? I seem to be unable to figure it out.... gosh, that would be a serious bummer for me if it wasn't there....... esp. with a long foreign trip coming up next week. \

Wow! This is easily the best review yet on the iPhone - particularly in the understanding and discussion of Apple's design decisions. Excellent job!!

Yes - one of the training vidios on Apple's website tells all about this. I can't remember which one but go to Apple, click on iPhone, and look for the iPod part of the training videos.

I don't have one yet but am working with my Chief Financial Office (a.k.a. wife) about getting one. The biggest reason for waiting? Still a year left on Verizon.

For me the list of what I wouldn't be using is quite short. What isn't there to like of what it currently actually has?

One feature that's almost worth the entire price for me (and there are many) is visual voicemail. Not so much the random-access portion, although that's wonderful, but the simple controls. You check your voicemail by touching the entry, after which it starts playing. Immediately. No voice prompts of any kind whatsoever. To delete it, you hit the "Delete," key. Wow. Simple, yet revolutionary.

As for the network - I know several people with "3G" phones. Even ignoring issues with crashing and browser L&F, and just looking at the network, I will admit that its a lot faster.

When it works.

And that's the catch. The iPhone is a true pleasure to use on a WiFi network, even to the point where I won't walk into the other room to surf something quickly if I just need a piece of information (like a movie time). Its that good. But more to the point, I have yet to find anywhere, even in places where other people's 3G phones have died off from lack of signal, where EDGE didn't work consistently.

So that's the key, IMO anyway. Great performance 90% of the time (or more), and damn near total availability the rest of the time. I'll take that over identically great performance 90% of the time and somewhat better performance for 5% of the time, if it means absolutely no connectivity the other 5%.

Damn! I've never read so many glowing remarks about an AI article. Mr. Eran should ask for more money.

That's because most articles aren't very good.

Or new friends. Most of mine don't check more than once or twice a day


If everyone had an iphone, maybe...

Even then, I think I would not want to check my email so often, because of the sheer volume I get. I get fewer SMSs, so can read them immediately.

It seems to me that the "just use email" line (used when complaints are made about missing MMS, long SMS, bluetooth file transfer or whatever) is the sign of an Apple apologist. If I was to use email for all communication needs on the iphone, it would be possible, but would cause me a great deal of annoyance. I can imagine the scornful looks of a motorola owner: "Your phone won't receive bluetooth messages?" If Apple truly had a better paradigm it might be different, but they don't: I'd have to change the behaviour of all my friends if email was to be a useful phone function.

I reached in my pocket to get out my iPhone and felt a sharp sting. I then noticed a small cut on my finger which started to bleed. On inspection of the iPhone I realized that the edge around the headphone jack is razor sharp. It shaved off a nice piece of skin which was lodged inside the jack. Ouch!

m

Perhaps you bought a RAZR by mistake?






Sorry, it was terrible, I know, but it had to be done.

good one

iPhone is bleeding edge

Actually, I need to do something about it. I suppose I could file in down or something. It is REALLY sharp all the way around that opening.

..just a note about the car integration.

I was able to pair the iPhone with my cars entertainment system (Mercedes). I can make and receive calls without a problem. Also got a very nice ring tone (different from my Razr).

However, the contact list is not transmitted. So calls have to be initiated from the cars keypad or from the iPhone - if it is not in my brief case.

Surely not perfect, but workable.

Gary

P.S.
Biggest iPhone flaws: No Cut & paste and no synchronizing Note Pad !

ROFL

As several others have pointed out, the issue is that people don't check their e-mail every ten minutes.

I even occasionally sent out SMS, asking people to check their e-mail.

Recieving:
1) Get a free Yahoo account
2) Forward email to Yahoo account

Sending:
1) Open up Mail
2) Type phonenumber @ their.carrier.com or hose from contacts in the reply field.

I've heard of some people claiming it never works but I've had no trouble sending emails to SMS enabled cell phones.

This of course doesn't work with phones that don't support any real email program. SMS is obsolescing. I hope it dies sooner rather than later.

Thank you.

I don't.

Any alternative to SMS that has been proposed results in more work for me. I don't want more work.

Why should I remember which network my friends are on? I have lots of friends, and have no other need for this information.

It seems abundantly clear to me how to solve the copy and past problem. Apple already has a gesture to accomplish dragging. For years (even before the multi-touch track-pads) Apple has provided the tap-tap-and-slide method. If you double-tap the track pad without releasing your finger the second time it initiates a drag. This is very useful and is pretty much the only way I select text on my MacBook. This easily translates into the user interface in iPhone. You should be able to tap-tap-and slide on text to initiate a drag (most likely for whole words because letter precision would be pretty hard - although the mag-glassing might solve this) then a menu should pop up to copy, cut, or move. I hope to see this come as a software update pretty soon.

Sure, if all phones were to handle e-mail as easily (including push) as SMS, e-mail could replace SMS. Except for the problem of spam. SMS almost always cost money. That cuts down the spam a lot. If I get spam via SMS it is in 99.9% of all cases from my wireless provider itself (who does not have to pay for spam).

That's quite a ridiculous comment to make.

Possible solution: Wipe your finger across the text to select it. Double tap to show a window with Cut, Copy and Paste options. Select option. Window closes, command is performed. Done.

I'm sure Apple will get around to fixing the problem. It's a 1.0 device - give them a chance.

EVDO is mostly worldwide compatible (except that CDMA phones lack SIM cards, so you're forced to expensively roam) and is used in various places such as South Koreathough they're switching to UMTS because of government regulationand by Au/KDDI in Japan. Both CDMA and EVDO are less common then GSM/UMTS surely, but are used by many places outside the United States.

UMTS is the family name of CDMA based 3G technology of various speedsused by GSM and a few CDMA carriers.

CDMA2000 is the family name for a different form of CDMA based 3G technology of various speedsused by CDMA carriers.

AT&T uses UMTS, like other GSM based carriers.

So:
CDMA / CDMA2000: 1xRTT-->EVDO Rev. 0-->EVDO Rev. A
GSM, GPRS-->EDGE / UMTS: WCDMA-->HSDPA-->HSUPA

UMTS comes in three common frequency bands:
850/1900 MHzAT&T in the USA, Rogers in Canada
2100 MHzevery other UMTS network in the world (except T-Mobile, which uses an incompatible version).

Note that Australia uses all three bands, the only country to do so.

Very nuce, well written review. I'll definetly check out the iPhone when it reaches the north, but now hopefully we can get back to macs.

great article. its major drawbacks are one "its" (instead of "it's") I noticed plus the now often-quoted "UTMS" mistake, which - funnily enough - is mentioned as "clumsily named". UMTS floats a bit better.

a smaller drawback: showing how WiFi is *soooooo* much faster than _any_ cellphone data service simply ain't true in real life conditions. WiFi hotspots often don't give you much bandwidth to start with, and if they're crowded they fall down quickly. UMTS however breaks the barrier for general use in my experience. GPRS and EDGE are "okay" for background E-Mail retrieval, but UMTS actually is enough for light browsing. So that's an important step. Broadband is nice, but it's not like you download 500 MB files through Safari on an iPhone. All you need is a decent speed to fetch maybe 100-200 KB at a time. EDGE makes you wait. UMTS doesn't.

(I'm talking from a European consumerist perspective, so don't cover me with HSDPA/HSUPA talk.)

Folks over at iLounge have tested the iPhone with bluetooth earsets that aren't apple's.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/ipo...tooth-headset/

Here's an alternative solution to the original problem posed in the [great] review "For example, when browsing a web page that lists a URL but does not provide a hyperlink (as many forums do), there is no way to copy and paste the URL into Safari's location bar; the user would have to manually type it out.".

Why not enable Safari [maybe optionally] to turn all non-hyperlinked URLs into hyperlinks?

Just a thought

I thought everyone told me that this thing had a SIM card slot, and you could easily replace the SIM card. Now you're telling me that the SIM card is tied to the phone? Boy, that sure makes it useless to all those idiots buying it on ebay for use overseas.

And I could've sworn someone said the phone would be tied to the SIM card. Its just so Apple.

The article was written by Daniel Dilger, the Roughly Drafted website author, so I'd suspect that like everything on that website the facts were carefully chosen to paint the Apple iPhone in the best possible light especially compared to any MS product.

To Mr. Dilger: Quit turning your AppleInsider reviews into f*cking advertisements for Roughly Drafted. And could maybe get over your overly blatant hatred of Microsoft. Really, does every article you write need to have the "bash MS" section even when it's completeley inappropriate?

To AppleInsider: Could you please send Dilger back to his own website and quite dragging your site down with his crap? If his reviews were any more biased, they would end with the Apple company summary that all of Apple's official press releases contain.

Great Article,, thanks.

Are you saying the iPhone uses this now?

So if you call up Google maps, it defaults (at least roughly) to your current suburb?

Eeeeeewwww..... you can see the reviewer/model's earwax on the headset in one of the pictures! (Btw, I noticed last Fri that the Apple Store was selling this model as an iPhone accessory, so I suppose it must work).

Houston, we are go for lift off!!!

Check out today's AAPL stock price--up 4% today with huge volume in a low volume market!

Wiat a minute...The iPhone does support SMS. In fact, it has the best SMS interface I have seen on any phone. However, it does not support MMS. MMS is like SMS, except you can add images to it.

Personally, I have never used MMS in my life. You can never be sure if the receiver's phone does MMS, and even if it does, whether it will show up correctly. MMS is something that either needs to be fixed, or replaced.

At least get his name right. Its Eran. And while I do agree he dislikes MS quite a bit, there are many good reasons to do so. Also, while he does occassionally cherry pick facts, at least Mr. Eran presents facts, which is a lot more than what any other reporter/blogger nowadays does. Also, if you see a common thread in Mr Eran's MS bashing, is when he holds up IE and PlayForSure as examples. I am sure even you agree that in both those cases, MS showed just how evil it can get. Again, the reason he bashes MS is because most of the time, they deserve it.

I copied his name from the top of the article, "Daniel Eran Dilger." Sorry, if he goes by his middle name.

And although he may report "facts," it's, in general, the same kind of "facts" that were used to justify the U.S. invading Iraq; by that I mean a very select set of facts that supports his view (and ignores all others). I've read several of his articles. The one that most sticks in my mind is the "10 Myths About AppleTV." He failed to really dispel any of them but he make up a lot of excuses. Oh, and gets in some MS bashing. There was also an article that was supposed to compare AppleTV and DVD; he never did get around to actually comparing them, but again he did have a bunch of excuses why iTunes video content was sufficient for the current market. Oh, and bash MS.

I don't really understand how PlaysForSure differs from say Apple's FairPlay, unless the argument is about how MS screwed over all of its PlaysForSure partners with the Zune. The open PlaysForSure market where manufacturers could make various devices with various features seems in general much more appealing than the closed iTunes/iPod/AppleTV/iPhone market Apple has produced. Yes, IE has cost the internet a great deal in terms of standards and for quite a while browser innovations. I can't really say I feel that MS is any more or less evil than Apple. I love the iMac I bought in December but chances are my next computer will be a PC because Apple seems unwilling to provide an upgradeable product at an affordable price point. And Apple seems to keep going further and further into computers as appliances as opposed to general purpose machines (as can be seen in the AppleTV and iPhone). I'd love to be able to slap a PhysX card into a computer and see what it did for games that supported it. Or even just a better graphics card, but even with a Mac Pro it probably wouldn't have drivers for the card. Apple seems to initially target the status symbol crowd and eventually (maybe) get down to the common person (it still hasn't gotten there with Macs). Is that any less evil than MS who basically give away a copy of Windows with every PC?

I don't know if anyone has seen this yet, but apparently you can also watch google Videos on your iPhone (as posted by Engadget). Simply go to the Google Video site and click on a video you would like to see. Of course you will see the "missing plug-in" icon on that page where the Flash player would be, but if you look to the right and see a "Download" link, you're in business. Now, click on the pull down menu to the right (the one that says "Window/Mac") and select instead "Video iPod/PSP." When you select this, it will start playing on your iPhone. Pretty neat.

Photo by Engadget

I've read a lot of Eran's articles over at RoughlyDrafted too, and I'd agree that he is baldly 'partisan' on the facts, re: Apple vs anybody. And I'm sometimes ok with that, as I know coming in that's what he is, and he's a nice counterweight to those who are baldly partisan going the other way, i.e. the Dvoraks and Enderle's of the world.

That said, it does kinda suck that you have to read Eran's stuff with a bit of a bs filter on. When he writes stuff like "The best case scenario for EVDO is about twice as fast as EDGE", you have to laugh, because it's not even close to being true... EVDO Rev A(i.e. what's out there now) is actually several times faster than EDGE, and that's with one giving ATT the benefit of the doubt re: its recent network improvements, and assuming a data speed of 200 kbps for EDGE. Eran isn't even in the ballpark here, though I'm sure he can cite some tortured reasoning in his defense. \

It gets funnier if you go to his site, where he mentions that EDGE is 'technically a 3G standard' under the official definition... I guess to imply that Apple 'really does' have 3G in the iPhone after all.

What he doesn't mention is that while there are certain implementations of the EDGE standard that can meet the official definition of 3G (i.e. 384 kbps speeds and up), ATT's implementation of EDGE isn't really one of them. Real-world speeds for ATT's EDGE are, at most, about half of what it'd take to be defined as 3G. Yes, even with their recent 'Fine EDGE' network improvements.

So, no, ATT's EDGE is NOT 3G. Just give it up already.

Dan's a good writer, but he seems to not understand that if you take a step back from the bleeding edge of facts-lawyering, the credibility and trust you gain far exceeds whatever advantage in debating points you lose. \



There are things I both like and loathe about Eran's writing. On the like side, he seems to have a very good grasp of Apple's business and technology strategies, and does a nice job of explaining their rationales.

On the down side, I think he also overidentifies with Apple through his understanding of those strategies, which results in him being sort of an 'uber-Apple-Apologista' at times... which is annoying. At times he seems to think that Apple, at least in the 'Jobs II' era, can do no wrong.

While they are doing great, no one bats 1.000.


I'm actually okay with the so-called 'MS bashing', because most of it is warranted, actually. Microsoft has been delivering second-rate products and failed strategies for a long time now, its about time more people called them on it.

And, ironically, the harsh criticism may help MS to become a better, more customer-focused company... right now, you get the feeling that they really can't see past their own arrogance and presumptions of eventual dominance.


PlaysForSure isn't 'open' from a platform standpoint through. It's Windows-only, last I checked. So if you're on a Mac or on Linux, oh well, too bad. Not so with FairPlay or iTunes, which are cross-platform.

Far as device openness goes, at least Apple is trying to go to DRM-free music, which would play on any device. Microsoft sure wasn't leading that charge, they are much more a 'yes man' to the major music labels than Apple has been.


Yep. IE's refusal to hew to established standards and its use by MS as a weapon to try to turn the Internet into a two-tier user experience, with non-IE, non-Windows users as second-class citizens, is pretty loathsome, dontcha think? So happy that Firefox (and now potentially Safari) is grabbing enough marketshare to help defuse those ogre-ish tactics some.


I agree. Its ridiculous to me that Apple seems to think that only the $2000-2500 and up market wants upgradeability.

Even if its mostly the 'Pro' market that actually uses upgradeability, there is a growing segment of 'pro wannabees' and 'prosumers' out there, and Apple is silly to either shut them out or drive them to the PC side. Not to mention that even non-Pro consumers still like the idea of upgradeability, even if they don't usually use it... if its a selling point, why not include it? Its not like Stevie J is going to burn in hades for including only 'cuz it hleps sells Macs. \


To be fair, there are many consumers who do want their computers to be appliances. My problem is that Apple erroneously assumes that anyone below the $2000 price range is automatically that customer.


Microsoft makes a great deal of money off of Windows, actually. It and Office are the two pillars holding up the company while their other ventures either fail or break-even. Yep, even their Xbox business, which has lost billions since it started and is only now starting to turn the corner.

I don't know about 'evil', but it does seem like MS is mostly devoid of innovation these days (the ultimate fast-follower 'me too' company), and they don't seem to be in the business of 'fixing broken things' the way Apple is. High-end, data-rich cellphones were broken... Apple fixed 'em, or is well on their way to doing so. Microsoft? They're looking at the iPhone and going "Ohhh-hh, that's what people want" (durr) and are trying to figure out ways to copy it and muscle Apple out of this interesting new market they've sort of created.

Not exactly 'evil', but certainly uninspired, at any rate.

As a consumer, Microsoft doesn't seem to actively be solving any of my problems, so, far as I'm concerned, they could dry up and blow away tomorrow and I wouldn't be missing them much. I think more and more people are starting to feel that way.

.

As far as I know, it supports SMS, but with a 160 character limit, and a single line text box for entering them. Correct me if I'm wrong.

That's not too bad an interface, but I know I'll miss the long SMS and full-screen text editor for them that my current phone has, at least sometimes.

Still, it's better than the iphone's state of MMS support

Amorya

Thanks for the superb review of the iPhone. This is hands down the most comprehensive and fair-minded review I've read so far.

I'd add only two comments. Regarding corporate e-mail, I am a Verizon-based Blackberry user (8830e) and need all of the features of that device in order to stay in touch with my co-workers on Exchange. I hope Apple addresses the issue with Exchange as I'd switch in a minute. IMAP is simply not an option. If you've ever worked in that interface, you know how limited it is. Without a "Reply All" feature it would be painful to have a meaningful e-mail string. I also require cut and paste and clickable URLs. I'm not defending the Blackberry's interface (better than Windows Mobile) or browser (which stinks) but as an e-mail device, it really is unmatched, especially for users of Microsoft Exchange. The Blackberry is OK as a phone, but clearly not as elegant as the iPhone in terms of design. I was just surprised that you referred to Windows Mobile and the Treo in your review, but you didn't once mention the Blackberry.

As for EVDO, I use a Sprint modem with Rev. A on my Macbook as a way of accessing the Internet when on the road. In fact, I read your review and am writing this response on it. It is NOTHING like the EDGE network. EVDO is fast and approaches some usable speeds that mimic ISDN and often faster when I'm in a major market, e.g., Miami. Your review helped me to better understand the reasons that Apple didn't go with 3G, but it doesn't change the fact that a high-speed network like Sprint's EVDO is invaluable to mobile users like me. EDGE, while understandable in the iPhone, is a show-stopper for me.

Add me to the Daniel Eran / Eran Dilger non-appreciation society.

He's a fanboy not a journalist.