There are already a good number of accessories available for the iPhone. We're considering just having it surgically implanted.

 

After waiting more than six months, we finally got our hands on an iPhone. As we discovered, it’s a truly amazing device that’s easy to love. But as slick as it is, it’s got its failings. In this comprehensive review, we show you how to enjoy its considerable strengths and work around its major weaknesses.

 

A LITTLE PIECE OF HANDHELD HEAVEN

Our infatuation with the iPhone starts with its industrial design, a sexy combination of glass, chrome, anodized aluminum, and plastic. The iPhone is the monolith of mobile phones, deserving of a museum display, not the dark depths of your pocket. The glass screen is amazingly scratch resistant (unlike the display on any iPod we’ve ever met), but it’s still glass. Your biggest worry here might be cracking the screen, a fate too horrible to contemplate. Still, there are reports of it happening (just search Google for "broken iPhone screen").

 

Then you turn on the iPhone and start sliding your fingers across and tapping the touchscreen. The movements came naturally: Use a pinching motion to zoom in and out, flick the tip of a finger up or down for fast scrolling, and tap once or twice to select things and execute actions. All of the iPhone’s built-in functions and applications are accessible from the home screen, and many have built-in back and forward buttons. To get back home, you can always press the Home button.

 

The onscreen QWERTY keyboard, the source of much criticism, has its learning curve, but we found that it wasn’t as steep as some have made it out to be. Typing takes a bit of practice - the keyboard is small, so mistyping is easy, especially if your fingers, like ours, look a lot like bratwurst. You need to develop a sense of where your fingertip touches a key. We quickly discovered that if you tap on a key just slightly to the left of center, you hit the key you want; tap closer to the right and you’re liable to hit the key to its right. The keyboard’s predictive text, which guesses what word you’re typing before you’re done or if you’ve misspelled it, works amazingly well. Of course, you can forget covert text messages to your party buddies typed under the table during a dull meeting: The lack of tactile feedback makes typing without looking nearly impossible.

 

CALL ME

For phone calls, the iPhone’s sound quality is clear but a bit muted, and we didn’t experience static or dropouts (we suspect this is mostly due to the fact that, unlike in some areas of the United States, AT&T’s wireless voice coverage in Northern California is quite good). The speakerphone works admirably well; its audio is clear, and everyone we called had no trouble hearing us. The iPhone comes with a stereo headset with an integrated microphone, and you pinch a tiny button embedded in the cord to answer and hang up calls.

 

When you get a call, the iPhone displays the caller’s info (if he or she is in your contact list) or just the number, as on any cell phone. When you tap the voicemail icon at the bottom of the home screen -- which displays the number of messages you have as a white number inside a tiny red circle - you see a list of messages, allowing you to decide which message to listen to first. You can always take a call, even if you’re listening to music, watching video, checking email, or browsing the Web. When the call’s over, the iPhone returns you to where you were, without losing your place.

 

On the downside, the iPhone’s Bluetooth integration is so limited, we wonder why Apple even bothered. It can be used with a Bluetooth headset only, and can’t be used to transfer files with other devices, sync to a computer, or “plug in” to Bluetooth stereo earphones. Apple’s iPhone Bluetooth Headset costs $129.

 

Two more niggles: It doesn’t have one-touch or voice dialing, which means that making a call in the car isn’t any safer - and is perhaps even more dangerous -- than it was with our old cell phones. Plus, the vibrate feature is a bit weak. On the other hand, one stroke of iPhone genius almost makes up for both hiccups: a switch on the side that instantly silences the ringer.

 

WHAT A WEB IT WEAVES

Apple touts a Web-surfing experience on the iPhone that’s free of the compromises usually required with other smartphones. In many ways, Apple has earned its bragging rights. On the iPhone, webpages display as they would on any computer. Text and pictures look surprisingly spectacular - this isn’t the watered-down Web of WAP. Although pages appear “full size” at first on the iPhone (meaning text is teeny-tiny on its 3.5-inch screen), you just double-tap or use a pinching motion to zoom in. To fill in text fields, tap the field and the iPhone zooms in and calls up the keyboard.

 

Of course, the iPhone Web experience comes with a special set of caveats. Sites that requires Flash or Java plug-ins prompt missing plug-in messages. But the greatest obstacle to the iPhone becoming the ultimate portable Web experience is AT&T’s EDGE network, where wireless data speeds hark back to 56K modem days. Browsing the Web on a Wi-Fi connection is much faster, however. While not as fast as the speeds you get on a Mac, it’s a huge improvement over EDGE. Sadly, because AT&T’s faster (and more expensive) 3G wireless data network requires different hardware, a first-generation iPhone won’t likely be capable of upgrading to anything faster than EDGE.

 

Supported email services include Yahoo, Gmail, .Mac, and AOL. You can also enter settings for your own IMAP, POP, and Exchange accounts, although Exchange is IMAP only, and the server must have an update called “Rollup 3” installed. For all supported email services, you can view plain-text and HTML messages, move them to an established folder, and forward and reply to them. But you can’t mark emails as spam. Photos that are attached to emails display in the message, and attachments in Word, Excel, and PDF format are quickly and easily viewable (but not editable) by tapping on them. Setting up the iPhone to access email is quick and painless, but we did experience key delay while typing email messages.

 

The iPhone supports SMS text messaging, which is displayed on the iPhone in an iChat-like display. But the iPhone does not have any kind of instant messaging support - a truly baffling omission (see JiveTalk for iPhone: First Look or How to Instant Message on an iPhone for more).

 

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MINI MULTIMEDIA PLAYER

The iPhone doesn’t have a clickwheel, but it’s very much an iPod. All the controls are on the touchscreen. You adjust the volume by dragging your finger along a slider bar and control tracks by tapping. Cover Flow, which displays album art and lets you visually sift through your music collection, adds wonderful richness to the experience.

 

The iPhone’s iPod sounds like a 5G iPod, with full midtones, nice highs, and bass that doesn’t drop heavy enough for those who like to thump - that’s with the earbuds, of course. The built-in speaker sounds like your dad’s transistor radio, so skip it. The recessed headphone jack is a slap in the face. It prevents you from using an array of third-party earphones without an adapter. Belkin and Griffin Technology both sell adapters, or you can look for the Apple iPod shuffle Sport Case for the first-generation iPod shuffle. It includes a headphone adapter that works on the iPhone as well - and we recently found a Sport Case on eBay for 99 cents plus $4 shipping.

 

The iPhone’s 3.5-inch display is small, but it truly dazzles. Color bursts from the screen, and text detail is some of the best we’ve seen on any handheld device, let alone a cell phone. Skin tones look realistic and have a smooth texture in photos and videos, and we didn’t detect any ghosting. In fact, the image quality is so good that it’s possible to actually enjoy a 2-hour movie, despite the miniaturization. A commercial DVD movie that we ripped to our Mac using Handbrake (free) and then formatted for our iPod played on the iPhone flawlessly, just like movies purchased from the iTunes Store.

 

Don’t count on the iPhone to replace your point-and-shoot camera, however. Its 2-megapixel camera offers decent quality for portraits taken in well-lit areas, but if you’re snapping a photo under remotely challenging conditions - bright backlights, movement, dim lighting, extreme distance, or close up - the camera falters, producing streaky, noisy, blurry photos. The oversensitive shutter button, which displays on the touchscreen, “helped” us shoot several pictures without meaning to. There’s also a 1-second shutter lag. And if you’re expecting a video-camera feature, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

 

UNDER THE HOOD

iPhone activation and management is done through a USB connection to your computer and using iTunes 7.3 or later. If you already used iTunes to manage your iPod media, that will be old hat. With the iPhone, you can manage your Calendar and Address Book settings in iTunes too. The iPhone is compatible with Address Book, iCal, and Microsoft Entourage on the Mac, but syncing with Entourage is clunky at best because iTunes doesn’t access Entourage’s data directly. To sync iCal and Entourage, you have to have a calendar in iCal called Entourage. Then from within Entourage, you sync Entourage and iCal so that iCal imports your Entourage dates. Then iTunes syncs your iPhone from the info in iCal.

 

It’s no wonder the iPhone feels like it has the power of a subcompact Mac: It runs OS X, which takes up 700MB of the 4GB or 8GB of storage space. Unlike MacBooks and other modern Macs, the iPhone doesn’t use an Intel processor, however. It uses a Samsung-manufactured ARM chip that’s quite snappy; you can zip through the iPhone interface without any delays. Some tasks, such as opening email attachments and Cover Flow, feel even faster than they do on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook.

 

Despite the OS X underpinnings, customization is severely limited. You can’t change the display font or font size, or reorganize or remove any of the application icons on the home screen. You can’t create custom ringtones or use MP3 ringtones. Another limitation: Apple is, so far, not allowing third-party developers to create true OS X apps that you install on the iPhone and launch from the home screen. Instead, Apple is encouraging developers to create AJAX-based Web apps that run on the iPhone in the Safari browser. (AJAX is a JavaScript-based Web development technique that allows programmers to develop interactive Web apps.) And you can’t rearrange or otherwise customize the home screen.

 

We also learned that you must be selective about what pictures, music, podcasts, and videos you put on the iPhone. After a few days, we’d already filled half of our 8GB iPhone with 205 photos, 333 songs and podcasts, and two movies. (Good thing we sprang for the larger storage capacity.)

 

In our continuous talk test, the iPhone’s battery lasted just over 7 hours with Wi-Fi off, and close to 4 hours with the Wi-Fi on. The iPod played music for nearly 23 hours and videos for 6 hours, 15 minutes. All good tallies, but they fall short of each of Apple’s published specs by about an hour. And, as with its iPod cousins, the iPhone’s battery can’t be removed. If you have to replace the battery, you must return the phone to an Apple Store (or send it in), which will replace it for $85.95 ($79 plus $6.95 for shipping). It takes three days, and the iPhone is returned to you stripped of all its data - so be sure to sync it with your computer first. If you need a loaner iPhone during the three-day period, Apple charges $29.

 

THE BOTTOM LINE

The iPhone is elegant. It’s exciting. And it’s the first device we’ve picked up in a long time that we just did not want to put down. The more we use the iPhone, the more we like it - EDGE network, warts, and all. For many users, the lack of a faster wireless data option is a deal breaker, and we can sympathize. But the iPhone does 98 percent of everything Apple claims it does so flawlessly, so well, that it’s hard to dwell on the downsides. The iPhone may be a first-generation product, but if this is a signal of what’s to come from Apple in the world of mobile devices, we can’t wait to see what the future holds. Welcome to the world Ai: After iPhone.

 

COMPANY: Apple
CONTACT: www.apple.com
PRICE: $499 (4GB), $599 (8GB)
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4.10 or later, iTunes 7.3 or later, USB
Gorgeous design. Feels great in hand. Intuitive interface. Touchscreen controls work well. Dazzling screen quality. Displays standard-formatted webpages. Good Wi-Fi connectivity. Excellent audio quality for music and phone calls.
Sluggish Internet access via AT&T’s EDGE network. Bluetooth limited to headsets. No instant messaging app. Fixed battery. Safari browser doesn’t support some plug-ins. Calendar doesn’t support iCal To-Dos. So-so camera.