My iPhone Review

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

Ok. Its sunday lunchtime. I’m currently doing a custom install of MYSQL and its time to start my review.I’ve been using my iPhone on and off for about 2 days now. So lets go through things.

Phone

I’ve only had some brief use of the actual phone call aspect, but from that I can say that its really easy getting to a contact to call. It may be more actions than another phone, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. Flicking through your contacts is so much nicer than repeated scrolling through a long list using the down key. Even searching is easy. Use the side bar to jump to a letter if you want.The actual call quality sounded great. The volume is very good, much higher than my N70, the speakerphone is loud enough, even on a mid-level volume. As you will see on the video, the screen dims when you put it to your face to help save battery power, and avoid pressing buttons with your face. When it is away from your face, there are large buttons for muting, speakerphone, ending call, and going to contacts.You can set up a favourites contact list, and select any number from any contact for quick access. Like speed dial really. And if you want the normal keypad you can.

Visual Voicemail is nice. I’m still waiting for a message but going into it for the first time, you’re asked for a voicemail PIN which you punch in, and you’re then asked to make a custom greeting or use the default. If you choose custom, hit record, speak at the phone (like its in speaker phone mode) and hit done. Then play it back to confirm or save it. Thats it. No dialing up, navigating a menu, waiting for a beep. Its all there on the screen and its really simple.

SMS

I love SMS. I text loads and now that its in the natural way, in a conversation stream, its so much easier to deal with. Sending one is as simple as adding a name or number (start typing a name and your contacts are filtered to narrow the choice then tap to select a name/number) Type your text, and then hit send. A nice little bar shows the sending progress and its gone. A little swoosh sounds and your message appears in the conversation. When you receive a text, your alert sounds (now customisable) and you get an on screen alert. The sender and a preview of the text is shown, and you get the option to view or ignore. If you ignore, a new message count is shown over the SMS icon on the home screen.Downside: So far no multiple recipient support, you can’t even choose a group of contacts from Address Book. Hopefully coming soon.

Calendar

Nice looking calendar view. Not much to say here. No multiple calendar support/multicoloured calendars. Again, hopefully coming soon. Oh, and there is no week view, only day, month, and list (handy to just see your appointments).

Mail

Love Mail. Its beautiful. Reading email is clear, you can double tap to zoom or pinch to zoom. Links are automatically make into clickable links, numbers are interpreted as phone numbers (if they are the right length) so tap to call. One thing thats very cool, when you click delete within a message, it is sucked into the trash icon, where the lid opens up to the side, and the message goes in, then it closes. Cool. Who else would put this much though into deleting an email?Multiple account support is great. I have 2 IMAP and 2 POP running and they work fine together. I have it set to check mail every hour so I don’t need to logon to Gmail online any more.

Safari/EDGE/WiFi

There has been a lot of moaning in the British media about the lack of 3G saying browsing outside of a WiFi hotspot will be slow. Let me say this. EDGE IS NOT SLOW! I have used both WiFi and EDGE here in Birmingham, and its been fantastic. It is slower than WiFi but thats to be expected, but is it too slow to deal with? Not at all. It took maybe 30 seconds to load a decent size webpage and is just as quick on smaller pages. I ran a speed test against my Nokia N70 on 3 (3G network connection) and surprisingly, my N70 scored an average of 79kbit/sec and my iPhone on EDGE (supposedly slower) scored 100kbit/sec. I can’t explain it, but browsing the web on my iPhone is infinitely better than the browsing experience on my N70.Seriously.

This is a big selling point. Page loading speeds aside, being able to view full web pages, formatted correctly is invaluable. Trying to get movie times on my N70 is laborious, having to navigate the specially formatted pages to go through city, cinema, film, then times is a pain, and compared to a simple Google Search, there is no contest. I can see all the local cinemas, whats on, every show time, the genre, and even run time in one page.

Wifi is just fantastic too. O2 offer free TheCloud WiFi which is great. That includes BT Openzones and should hopefully also include Starbucks (yet to be confirmed. More reports tomorrow once I try it). Using home Wifi is easy. Turn it on, it will ask you to select a network to join, enter the password if you have one. And thats it. You’re conected. And the iPhone remembers your network settings so will join the network when it sees it. And there is no requirement to verify your WEP/WPA key.

Future Features

There isn’t much I would add at the moment but here’s my list

1. Copy and Paste
2. Multiple recipients for text messages
3. Week calendar view
4. Video recording
5. To Do Lists

Luckily, most of this could come with a firmware update, or even via third party applications. Thats it. Not much more to say from me. I’ll probably post some more thoughts as they come to me as I enjoy my iPhone.

Tags: 02, apple, iphone, iphone review, review
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