- Introduction
One of the most hyped consumer devices ever, the iPhone marks the iconic Apple brand entry into the cellphone space.
Does it live up to the hype, or does it let us down....
For this review, I played with the iphone along with my two existing smartphones, the N73ME (Symbian) and ipaq 6365 (Windows mobile) and have tried to draw comparisons, wherever possible.
- OOBE
The iPhone comes neatly packaged in a small box. As with all things apple, you would hate to throw the packing away.
The box contains the phone, a AC charger, a USB cable (same as the ipod cable sans the physical locks on the sides), a dock and a micro fiber cloth
A protective pouch would have been a good addition to the set of accessories however.
Do note that out-of-the-box, the iPhone does nothing-nada-nothing
Apart from the network lock, all other functionality is locked too till you activate the AT&T Sim that it comes bundled with.
- Physical Impressions
The bottom side has an industrial brushed aluminum finish which is tonnes better than the scratch prone chrome finish on ipods.
Top View
Backside
Side View
The top part (screen) is made of scratch proof glass.
What this means is you can dump the iphone in your pocket with other stuff without worrying about the screen getting scratched.
On the flip side, if you drop the phone, I am not sure how well the glass screen would take the fall.
All in all, just for the looks of it, it is perhaps the best looking phone on the market.
But then looks don't really mean much, so let's see how it fares on the other, and more important departments:
- Screen Quality
The screen on the N73 and the ipaq looks antiquated in comparison.
The resolution, the sharpness, the color reproduction and the quality of the text rendering is miles ahead of the other two (or any other phone I have seen)
Ah, the glorious screen
Pictures look beautiful , videos look fluid while text is rendered with amazing clarity.
Rating: 5/5
- Phone quality
Reception is at par with standard phones.
I carried a N73 ME along with the iphone to check for coverage inside a lift and both phones dropped the signal at about the same time.
The voice clarity is decent over the inbuilt speaker though a whole lot better when using the bundled earplug. The volume on the inbuilt speaker could have been a tad louder but nothing that would bother you too much unless the calling/called party is speaking too softly.
Overall, the audio quality on the in-built speakers is decent, though the speakers on the N73 do a better job.
The speakerphone is a mixed bag. It's loud enough to work fine as a speakerphone in quiet environs but not loud enough to be of practical usage when in a noisy area. The N73 speaker phone is a lot better in comparison.
Some reviews on the net complain about the bad reception quality. I am not sure if it is an AT&T issue, but I have not noticed any reception or static issues.
note: One very nice touch is the convenient on screen menu when on a call which lets you merge/swap multiple calls with one touch.
Rating: 4/5
- PIM
Contacts: Contacts need to be synced via Outlook/outlook express and transferring contacts from my N73ME was fairly easy..
The contact manager is easy to use and lets you set favorite contacts for easy access.
The main contacts menu lets you jump between alphabets through an A-Z panner on the right hand side of the screen.
You can assign pictures to your contacts, and you can pan/zoom within a picture before assigning it to the contact.
Having said that, bringing up a contact from your phonebook and dialing the number without looking at the screen (say while driving) is impossible.
After some practice, I can manage to bring up the keyboard and dial a number without looking though.
However, the tactile feel of a keyboard which is so essential when trying to make calls without looking at the screen is a let-down.
Calendar:
Very usable and easy to use calendar...nothing special compared to say the calendar on the N73, but the bigger screen makes it easier to use.
Notes
LOL..what do i say, the notes app lets you take quick notes.
- Connectivity
Edge/gprs supported. No 3G support. Not that we have 3G in India but that would still be a good to have
Wi-fi:
802.11 b/g support with WEP/WPA. When the phone detects a wireless network in range, it will notify you with an on-screen pop-up.
If a network is already configures, the phone would switch over to the wireless network over Edge.
What this means is if you are accessing a site over Edge and you walk inside the house, the phone seamlessly switches over to your house network.
Bluetooth
What a letdown.
What was Apple thinking?
The in-built BT module supports only the Handset profile.
What this means is no object transfer over bluetooth and no Dial-up-networking via BT
There are work-arounds available for some missing profiles, e.g. you can setup DUN with your laptop via an ad-hoc wireless network and using a SOCKS proxy running on the iphone to route your http requests through the phone.
But this does not mean that the cripple BT services are not a big let down. Shame on you Apple for doing this
Rating: 4.5/5 for the wi-fi
1/5 for BT
- Browser
Although the user experience is still not the same as what it would be on a full blown PC, but the mobile browsing experience finally comes close for the first time.
Sites render beautifully without slowing down the phone as on the N73ME or the ipaq
When a page loads up the first time, the screen shows you the full page zoomed out to be rendered within the screen as it would render on a PC.
Now obviously, except for sites like Google, the zoomed out page isn't of much use on a 3.5" screen so you double tap on the area you want to zoom in and presto, the section zooms in with zero lag
if you don't like double tapping, you can squeeze your fingers in or out to zoom in or out and the page responds immediately.
In zoomed in mode, you just move your finger left/right/up/down to scroll vertical/horizontally/sideways
Screenshot of Safari
I have been using the phone for a week now and haven't come across a site that doesn't work on the iphone browser ..., be it Google, TE or ICICI direct
There is multiple tab support and switching between tabs is again a tap and flick affair.
The only limitation on the browser is lack of flash support but that is not something that bothers me too much.
The N73 browser /IE on the iPaq in comparison look totally archaic with their infinitely longer rendering times.
Rating: 4.5/5
- Youtube
I actually hadn't even bothered trying youtube till 2 days ago assuming there's no way it would work on my slow Airtel GPRS. Surprise, surprise!
YouTube search Window
It seems when the phone is on Edge/GPRS, the phone sends out a low res video request and plays it back without any buffering or processing delays
Funnily enough, when I am at home and the phone is on the wireless network (oh, it switches automatically to wi-fi when it can find an approved wireless network), youtube stutters because the phone assumes it is connected to broadband and requests for full res videos while my measly 256kbps BB connection cannot handle.
All in all, it is fun to have access to youtube while on-the-go.
Perfect timepass when travelling.
Kudos to Apple to include this nifty applet that performs so well even on Edge.
- Other default apps
The weather applet, the stocks applet function as they are expected to
The Google map applet is also a joy to use and is a really handy tool to have on your phone.
I needed to meet a friend last weekend. He was somewhere in a place called Valuvar Kottam when I called him while on the way.
Even though I have never been to that area of town before, I just looked up the address on Google maps and bingo!
The normal pinch and squeeze mode of usage works on the maps too.
- Camera:
The 2 MP camera is a mixed bag.
On the flip side, there is absolutely nothing you can customize. No options to change white balance or shutter speed or anything for that matter. Just the camera and an on screen button to click the image.
Also, the lack of a hardware button to click pics is a bit of a pain.
Having said that, The photos are surprisingly sharp with a good color balance and cast coming close to the picture clarity on the N73
The lack of Video recording support is a sham though but hopefully should be made available by Apple in the next update, or some third party app developer should be able to figure out a way soon.
- Photos
The photo app is easy to use with sub second response times to flip between pictures or to zoom in/out (the same pinch/squeeze action) and immediate landscape /portrait flips just by flipping the phone in landscape/portrait mode make the photo app a joy to use.
The N73, in comparison takes an eternity to flip/zoom
Photo App
- The iPod
This has to be the best ipod ever.
the huge screen makes watching videos a joy. The lack of a click wheel is more than compensated by the fluid finger gestures.
Flip the phone around and the playlist changes into a flippable coverbook with album art. Click on the album and the cover flips around to display the titles within it.
Cover View
Flipped Cover
The sound clarity is great on my EP630s but the bundled earplugs as expected are a sham.
The only flaw on the ipod is that the eq settings are buried deep within and it will take 4 clicks to reach the eq settings (home button >settings>ipod>eq settings) and a parametric equalizer is still missing.
Setting up the iphone to sync with my gmail account took less than 2 mins.
I am currently only using it with Gmail so I cannot talk about the compatibility of the maill app with other forms of mail though I hear that MS exchange support is iffy
What is painful however is that fact that the mail app does not download entire messages at one go.
- Keyboard
The lack of a physical keyboard is a bit annoying to start with.
However, the OSK is very responsive and it takes a few mails and SMSes to get used to the keyboard.
The spell correction mechanism works very well and sidestepped letter presses are automatically corrected without you even realizing it.
(e.g. trt gets automatically corrected to try while typing
If you explicitly reject a correction, the word is automatically added to the dictionary.
Overall, after a week's usage, I can type mails/messages faster than on T9 though slower than a physical keyboard (as on the HTC TyTn/Cingular 8525.)
- Miscellaneous:
The unit comes with a dock and a charger.
However, I still miss the existence of a regular USB-B connector on apple devices. Another
at AppleThe device syncs up as well as any other ipod with itunes though on top of that, it lets you sync photos, contacts and mail.
- Battery Life
The battery needed a charge every night for the the first few days when everyone in my office was playing around with it.
Now that it has reached a regular usage pattern (30-40 mins of voice, 1-2 hrs of actiove usage, 2-3 hrs of passive usage (ipod) and remaining in standby, seems like the battery needs a recharge every 2nd day
- 3rd Party App Support
and limiting 3rd party apps to browse based applets.This however does not mean that 3rd party apps are not available.
There are underground groups actively churning out native iphone apps like eBook Readers, Games, productivity apps etc.
Yet the fact that 3rd party apps aren't officially supported is a downer.
Cons:
* Crippled Bluetooth
* No Clipboard
* No Video recording on Camera
* Only underground 3rd part app support available, which would limit the growth of the app library
Whew...Almost the end but the conclusion, so here it comes
Conclusion
Even though I have tried to keep this review as objective as possible, there is no denying the fact that this is one device that cannot be reviewed objectively.
Forget the looks, forget the hype, what hits you when you use this device the first time is how well it manages to do the things it does.
The intuitive interface, the fluid response times and the responsive controls make this device an absolute joy to use.
Perhaps it is the 600mhz proccy and the 256 (?) MB of RAM that help
achieve this, but again, you really don't have to run a synthetic benchmark on this phone or dissect the configuration to realize that the performance and user experience is so very different from any other phone.
The phone is fraught with its shortcomings, the crippled bluetooth, missing clipboard and video recording being the major omissions.
However, you are more than willing to forgive these misses because it handles everything else so incredibly well.
Technically speaking, my N73 can do all that the iphone does and more (give the solid Symbian apps library) but what I have noticed so far is that on the N73 or ipaq, I would use a geeky feature to try it out, have fun with it for a day or two and then forget about it once the initial excitement would wear off because it would be too messy and complicated to keep using those applications.
This device however makes doing whatever it does so easy and fun that you would not hesitate to use any of the features.
To conclude, it is very easy to pen down a critique for what this device lacks, but it is not at all easy to describe what this device has , a certain je ne sais quoi if you will, (and that's the reason why I have not listed any pros above) and you really need to try it out in person to understand why I am gushing so much over this phone.
