iPhone
Apple's Most Anticipated Product Is Here
15 July 2007 Justin Williams Skip to comments
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Justin Williams has spent the last two weeks with Apple's new iPhone. Is it worth the hype? Read on to find out more.
In January, when the iPhone was first announced, June seemed far away. While the buzz was incredibly high for the iPhone, many people were frustrated they would have to wait so long to have the game changing device in their own hands.
For one of the first times ever, Apple CEO Steve Jobs offered a look behind the curtain at what was coming down the pipeline from Apple. Apple started the hype machine at Macworld by keeping the iPhone locked behind a glass case so that users could only see, but not touch the device. The momentum was followed up with the Hello ad during the Oscars in February featuring characters from famous television shows past and present answering a phone. The pre-announcement of iPhone was necessary since the device would have to undergo intense FCC scrutiny in the coming months. For 6 months, Apple fanatics and doubters had ample time to both praise and dismiss the device without having laid their hands on it. And people did talk! Google News had nearly 22,000 articles on the iPhone -- a device that very few people had ever touched.
The hype machine picked up substantially in the thirty days preceding the iPhone's launch. Apple announced June 29th as the birth day for iPhone and began releasing more information about the device. Between the television ads and how-to videos posting on Apple's site, iPhone fever began to hit the country.
Now that June 29th has come and passed, thousands of people around the country have iPhones. I've spent the past few days using the iPhone as my cell phone, Internet communicator and iPod.
Phone
The main reason I wanted an iPhone was because I have never been completely satisfied with the user experience of the cell phones. The iPhone aims to eliminate the complexity and confusion that has surrounded the cell phone by changing both the interface and user experience.
Weighing in at just 4.5 inches tall, a little less than half an inch thick and a mere 4.8 ounces, the iPhone features a single button on its face, which takes the user back to the home screen of the phone. There is no send or end call button. Instead, all interaction with the phone takes place via tapping and dragging on the 3.5" screen with your finger. Apple has removed the primitive keyboard found on Blackberrys and Treos and replaced it with an on-screen keyboard that appears when you tap on a text field.
When you first connect your iPhone to your Mac, it launches iTunes and walks you through activating your AT&T account. This involves selecting your voice plan, tying your iPhone to your iTunes account and porting your phone number from another carrier if necessary.
The iPhone is completely useless without activation, so if you have plans to just use the iPhone without activating an AT&T account, you are out of luck. I ran into this issue because it took AT&T over eight hours to activate my account. After waiting in line for eight hours in front of an AT&T store, it was very frustrating to come home and not be able to use my phone until the middle of the night when the phone was finally activated.
As a cell phone, the iPhone contains almost all the functionality you've come to expect from a mobile phone. You can make and receive phone calls, send text messages and synchronize all of your contact information with either a Mac or a PC.
Once your phone is activated, the iPhone synchronization process is similar to that of an AppleTV or iPod. You are able to select the music, videos and photos you want to synchronize to your iPhone. The iPhone also syncs your address book, Safari bookmarks and iCal data seamlessly.
As a cell phone, the iPhone is fantastic. The voice quality through both the iPhone itself and through the small microphone on the earbuds is fantastic. The person you are talking to sounds crystal clear, and there have been no complaints about my audio quality either.
When I first saw the iPhone, I was worried about having it up to my ear to speak since the entire screen is a touch surface. The iPhone detects when it goes up to your ear, and turns off the screen, so you won't accidentally press a button with your cheek.
By far, the best experience I have had with the iPhone is with text messaging. I am an avid SMS user who sends and receives upwards of 2,000 messages a month. SMS messages on the iPhone are displayed in chat bubbles exactly like they would be with iChat on the Mac. The combination of the iPhone's keyboard and dictionary make writing messages much easier than using T9 on my previous phones. While I'm not nearly as fast as with my old phone, I am gaining momentum as I get used to the interface.
If you're a multimedia message sender (MMS), however, you will be disappointed that the iPhone does not support the technology. Instead, iPhone wants you to send your photos via e-mail, which isn't an ideal solution for non-smartphone users.
One of the unique features to the iPhone's mobile experience is its support for visual voicemail. With other cell phones, listening to voicemail is a linear experience, but the iPhone allows you see a listing of all the voicemails in your box and select individual ones to listen to.
iPod
The iPhone is the most powerful iPod Apple has ever produced. Like the 5G Video iPod, the iPhone is able to play audio and video and view photos and slideshows. The iPod functionality takes full advantage of the iPhone's gesture-powered interface.
Navigating through your music involves flicking your finger across the screen to find the tune you are looking for. If you rotate the iPod horizontally, it will switch to Cover Flow view, which allows you to navigate your library by its album art. Clicking an album cover flips the cover and provides a listing of songs to choose from. CoverFlow is fluid even with a large iTunes library.
My music listening experience has not been without a few issues. Each day, I download podcasts to my iPhone so I can listen while at the gym. The file I typically use is over four hours long, so I have it set to remember playback position in iTunes. Several times, the iPhone has not passed my playback position back to iTunes, which leads to me having to find where I was previously.
Another issue with the iPod functionality is its inability to dynamically resize video content to fit the screen. For example, I have several video podcasts that are formatted at 640x360 because I also have an AppleTV and want to view my video in widescreen. Sadly, these won't sync to the iPhone without converting it for use with the iPod.
Probably the most frustrating of the iPod features is its use of a proprietary headphone jack that forces users to purchase $10-$20 adapter to use many third-party headphones and auxiliary jacks. I'm unable to use my iPhone in my car until Apple ships the adapter to me. Most headphone jacks are too thin to fit into the iPhone and establish a connection.
The final issue with iPhone functionality is the lack of support for several iPod-made accessories. Things like the Apple FM radio module and the Nike+ kit are not presently supported by iPhone. Apple never claimed these devices would work with iPhone, but it would be nice to see support in the future -- especially for the Nike+ device.
Overall, while I'm satisfied with the basic playback functionality of the iPod feature set, it's my least favorite part of the iPhone's functionality pack.
Internet Communicator
Besides making phone calls and playing music, the iPhone also triples as a full-fledged Internet device. The iPhone connects to the Internet either via WiFi or AT&T's EDGE network. If there is an open WiFi network within range of your iPhone, it will use that connection over the AT&T network because the speed is substantially faster.
EDGE is incredibly slow compared to WiFi or AT&T's more powerful 3G network. Apple opted to go with EDGE because it is more widely available throughout the country and because it drains the battery less than the existing 3G chipsets. AT&T has spent millions improving their EDGE network over the past six months to prepare for the iPhone launch, but those speed increases are only seen in larger cities such as San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia. If you are in the middle of Indiana, you're not likely to notice much of a speed difference.
No matter what connection you use to get online, you will enjoy the iPhone's Web browsing experience. Apple includes a full version of its Safari rendering engine on the iPhone so that you can view Web pages just as you would see them on your Mac. When you view a page, it shows the entire site on the screen. You can zoom in on a section by double-tapping the screen.
The only caveat to the browsing experience is the lack of Flash and Java. Not having Java eliminates the ability to run hundreds of Java-based cell phone applications such as Google's Gmail or games. Not having Flash is both a blessing and a curse. Viewing ESPN.com is now a sane experience because the annoying Flash ads and instant playback videos are not functional.
In addition to the full version of Safari, Apple bundles a mobile version of Mail.app that synchronizes your e-mail accounts from your Mac onto your iPhone. Typing and sending e-mails from MobileMail is seamless, and using IMAP, all my sent messages are passed back to my Mac. Unlike the full version of Mail, there isn't a unified Inbox, which is frustrating if you are using more than one email account.
Missing from Apple's MobileMail application is a junk mail filter. If a message hits my iPhone before my Mac's filters, I am bombarded with Viagra spam. If you use Yahoo! e-mail, you can take advantage of PUSH email. Sadly, there is no support for the IMAP IDLE extension, which gives PUSH-like e-mail to IMAP servers.
My favorite aspect of the Internet Communicator aspect of the iPhone is the Google Maps application. It really is as easy as the Calimari commercial makes it out to be. Anything that you can find using the full version of Google Maps is available in the maps application. You can view it on a standard map or in satellite view, which gives you an overhead satellite view of the location. I wouldn't recommend trying to work with satellite view when on the EDGE network. It's far too slow. The regular map view is quite usable over EDGE though.
Google Maps supports driving directions, but it's not as automatic as I would like. You have to tell the iPhone when you pass a marker that is set by Google Maps so that it can give you the next direction. Since the iPhone doesn't have GPS, this is the only way directions could be accomplished. Hopefully Apple will add GPS in a future revision.
If you are a YouTube addict, you'll definitely enjoy the YouTube application that comes bundled with the iPhone. Apple has gotten YouTube to convert their library to the H.264 codec instead of their standard Flash. Currently, the entire YouTube library isn't available on your iPhone, but it is supposed to be available on both the iPhone and AppleTV by fall 2007.
The YouTube application isn't usable on EDGE, but it's a great time killer when connected via WiFi.
A Picture Is Worth...
The iPhone comes with a 2 megapixel camera attached to it. The camera takes decent photos when there are normal lighting conditions, but the quality of the photos deteriorate when lighting conditions are poor. The iPhone camera also lacks autofocus, which can be frustrating in certain photography situations.
You can see a nice sample of iPhone photos on Flickr.
Speaking of Flickr, one thing that annoys me about the iPhone's camera application is that it doesn't preserve the photographs EXIF data when resizing a photo for e-mail. EXIF is the format that is used to store information about each photo you take inside the actual photo.
After you take photos, they are stored in iPhone's pictures application. This application syncs your iPhoto or Aperture library in the same way the iPod Video and Nano do. iTunes processes smaller versions of your photos to synchronize to your iPhone so that photos do not take up too much space. This is especially beneficial for someone that shoots in RAW or uses a high megapixel camera. Unlike the original iPods, however, photos are far more useful and fun to view on the iPhone thanks to being able to scroll through them with your finger. I always found the iPod's scroll wheel too sensitive when scrolling through a library of photos. The iPhone has found a perfect speed to scroll through photos with.
Any photo in the Pictures application can be emailed or set as the desktop wallpaper. When you choose to mark a photo as your wallpaper, iPhone prompts you to size the photo to your desired size and position if the photo doesn't fit entirely on screen. The process is seamless and really helps to show how the iPhone's touch interface shines.
The Kitchen Sink
I've only touched the surface of what the iPhone offers in its initial release. There's plenty more available for the iPhone including several applications. The iPhone comes bundled with a Weather application that allows you to get a six-day forecast for as many cities as you'd like. You can swap between cities by sliding your finger from side to side on the screen. iPhone also comes bundled with a stock application that mimics the Tiger Dashboard widget.
There is also a Notes application that has a look that matches Leopard's Mail notes feature. Notes do not sync in anyway with your Mac at this point, but I would bet that Apple adds support for that feature once Leopard ships.
The Clock and Calculator applications are pretty boring, but useful. Calculator let's you perform the basic four functions. The Clock application lets you keep the time of several different cities from a single interface. You can also use it as a stopwatch or countdown clock. Both of these applications work as you would expect.
Third-Party Support
At WWDC07, Apple announced that the developer kit for the iPhone was Safari. Apple doesn't want to open up its new mobile phone platform to Mac developers because they are trying to preserve the iPhone experience. Rightfully so, many developers balked at this. Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile and Blackberry all allow developers to extend the functionality of their smartphones through third-party applications. Many have predicted that Apple will open the iPhone platform down the line, but the APIs aren't in a state to be publicly usable.
I'm not opposed to keeping a semi-closed platform. If Apple established a Widget platform for the iPhone, I'd be satisfied. Telling users and developers that the iPhone is extensible by bookmarking a few Web applications in Safari is disingenuous. Offering a way to move those applications out of the bookmarks and giving them a front row seat in the iPhone interface would help solidify Web 2.0 as the iPhone development platform.
What's Missing
There are three things that I think the iPhone is missing that would make it a perfect experience.
- RSS: Apple has an iPhone RSS reader, but it's not an experience I find intuitive. There's no easy way to subscribe to an RSS feed without manually entering the feed's URL. I would much prefer having a mobile version of NetNewsWire that syncs between my Mac and iPhone. Alternatively, I have found that Google Reader is a decent compromise if you just want to have a small subset of feeds.
- iChat: The iPhone is absolutely begging for an iChat client for instant message conversations. Every smartphone platform out there has an IM client, and the fact that the iPhone is missing it is disappointing.
- Movies Widget: While this isn't as big an issue as the other two, I think a movies widget to compliment the Stocks & Weather widget would be great. I'm a movie buff, and having one-click access to the show times at my local theaters would be a killer feature.
Conclusion
I know it's become cliché at this point to go on about how great the iPhone is, but it really is worthy of all the praise it has received. Apple aimed to change everything you hate about your cell phone and the mobile phone experience, and they succeeded. From the iTunes-based activation to actually using the iPhone daily, I can't explain how worthy of the hype and price the device is.
Though the device is not perfect, I am willing to lose a bit of functionality other phones might offer in exchange for the iPhone experience. There's also a chance that missing functionality can be added via software updates. Although there's no software update that can fix the slow speeds of AT&T's EDGE network, there has been talk that Apple plans to add things like Flash, iChat and other Leopard-only features in the coming months to the iPhone platform.
Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at
Reader Comments (3)
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#1) On July 15, 2007 9:35 PM
Hi!
A very interesting and comprehensive review. Keep up the good work. I have referenced your article in my blog. Hope that’s not a problem.
#2) On July 26, 2007 7:48 AM
I also have the ‘Remember Playback Position’ issue — sometimes it works, sometimes not. Can’t find anything on the APple forums about this.
#3) On November 7, 2007 2:27 PM
I find the iPhone useless and expensive in which i only had for a week and it kept saying NO SERVICE now i was told that the problem was the phone not my phone carrier. I was so disappointed, I have to admit the picture quality is awesome, but thats about it. Either way i returned the phone and got most of money back- charged 10 percent restocking fee-or to be exact its a pending credit note in which i should receive w/in 10 business days.