Apple's iPhone: The Future is Here
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 2, 2007 6:13 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
It's an iPod Dammit
The one aspect of the iPhone that still hasn't sunk in for me is the fact that this thing is actually an iPod. Inevitably the majority of attention has been placed on the phone/internet aspects of the iPhone, while its ability to be an iPod has been relegated to a casual mention in passing. But the iPhone is quite capable of replacing your iPod, provided that you're not dependent on having more than 8GB of music with you at all times. True music aficionados will still hang on to their iPods, but the iPhone is designed for the crowd with slightly less music who love their iPods but hate carrying two devices around. If you carry your iPod around everywhere, the iPhone should be quite tempting as it helps reduce pocket clutter.
The iPod + phone meld not only makes sense, but it's done well on the iPhone. About the only thing that's missing is the ability to assign your MP3 files as ringtones.
The classic iPod interface is changed, having been replaced by something that conforms better to the iPhone UI. Playlists are obviously still supported, as is the ability to create a playlist On-The-Go.
You can browse music according to artists, songs, albums, composers or genres. You can even customize the menu at the bottom of the iPod screen to give you direct access to audiobooks or podcasts. The one thing that I'm really missing that's present in iTunes on the Mac/PC is the ability to type and search by name for a song/artist/album.
Viewing all the tracks on an album gives you this slick interface, the slider at the bottom controls volume
Tilt the iPhone on its side and you get a layout of album covers to flip through, much like you would at a record store, if you'd like to listen to an album in particular. If you have a lot of music that's unreleased (or poorly pirated), you'll be greeted with a bunch of blank album covers which ruins some of the beauty of this feature.
This would look cooler if everything had album art
There doesn't seem to be a full hold mode on the iPhone; while hitting the sleep/wake button will prevent you from accidentally hitting anything on the screen, the volume rocker is still active.
Thankfully the iPhone has a volume limiter that you can engage to prevent you from accidentally ruining your hearing while listening to music with the iPhone in your pocket.
The speaker on the iPhone, while well suited for voice conversations, is not great for listening to music. It's functional but prepared for distortion-a-plenty, you're better off sticking to headphones.
The earbuds that come with the iPhone are a standard set of iPod headphones with a mic/button about 5 inches below the right earbud. If you're listening to music when you get a phone call, the iPhone will automatically fade out and pause your music so that you can answer your call (just click the button on the headphones). Click the button again to hang up and you're back to your music.
When I first went to try video playback on the iPhone I was lost, I kept looking around for a video player until I eventually remembered that the iPod button was all encompassing - audio and video seekers can find refuge there. The video formats supported by the iPhone are the same as the iPod and Apple TV, you're basically limited to low bitrate H.264/MPEG-4 files, both of which Quicktime Pro will encode for you. The iPhone is in dire need of DivX/XviD support, but that's something Apple will never do, so either plan on converting anything you want to watch to H.264/MPEG-4 or wait for someone to hack this thing.
Videos look great on the iPhone and as a whole, it puts competing devices to shame. While both the Blackjack and Blackberry can play MP3s and videos neither has the storage or interface of the iPhone, they are functional but not nearly as well done as a dedicated iPod or in this case an iPod within the iPhone.
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icruise - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Excellent review that (surprisingly, given that this is a very tech-oriented site) "got" what the iPhone is about. It may not be the perfect cell phone, but it's certainly an amazing one, and the first really fresh take on the concept that we've seen in a long long time.One quibble, however. The review states that Yahoo charges $3 a month for push email support. Yahoo does in fact provide free IMAP push email to anyone using a Yahoo Mail account on the iPhone. However, there appears to be some issues involved in the implementation and I couldn't find any mention of using push email with Yahoo in the Apple documentation, which may be why the reviewer didn't realize this.
It seems that if you have any other email accounts active on the iPhone, push email doesn't work reliably. It may take quite a while (many minutes) to show up. I tested this on my iPhone and when I had my Yahoo Mail account as the only active account, messages sent to it showed up pretty much instantaneously. When I enabled the other accounts, that changed, whether I had mail checking set to "manual" or a special interval. So in short, I think the iPhone's push capability is there, but they haven't quite ironed out the bugs. Hopefully they will do this soon with a software update, and also enable push email for .Mac mail as well.
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, July 7, 2007 - link
How bout horizontal/landscape mode for the keyboard? With all this talk about fingers not being small enough for crammed keys, I'm blown away this wasn't addressed. Based on the aspect ratio of the keyboard in front of me, and the aspect ratio of the iphone, I don't see why you'd possibly want to type in portrait mode.ViperV990 - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
I'm curious if meebo.com (a web-based multi-protocol IM) works on the iPhone. Can anyone please give this a try and report back?Icehawk - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
Great article, I really hadn't read or watched too much on the iPhone so it was nice to see it all laid out clearly.Sadly the phone, like my Tivo S3, is missing some very basic features (voice activation?!) and has some weird ergonomic misses.
However I think this is a big deal, if the interface is as much of advance overall as it sounds that is big. IMO the next major advance computing (and these MFDs by extension) is the interface - we are still using pretty much the same paradigms as 20 years ago.
Calista - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
Hi Anand!I would like to know how you judge the value of the iphone. We fully understand that you find it an awesome device but it's no denial that it's also a fairly expensive and $600 will buy you both a normal feature phone (2MP cam and the rest) and a well-working internet-tablet like the Nokia N800 - which by the way support up to 16 GB of memory, carry a screen with higher resolution than the Iphone and support Skype. It's another device to carry for sure, but only another 200 grams and it can be left safely in your home when doing things more ..action-packed than sipping coffee at Starbucks.
Quite frankly, I would feel fairly uncomfortable carrying a $600 device in my pants all the time.
Justin Case - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
I'm sure you realise there's an obvious joke lurking in that last sentence... ;-)Justin Case - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
Any chance of a comparison with the Qtek 9000 or Nokia's N700...?2ManyOptions - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
Why the hate? Its not something which you can totally reject or totally throw like trash ! It does look good when compared to it's competitors.The price tag for the iPhone is an individual's concern. If he/she thinks spending 700$ on iPhone is cool, so be it, i wouldn't lose anything !! Does that mean the person who bought an iPhone is stupid?? I wudn't agree with that, its his money n his idea of fun n spending.
I would like to buy something like an iPhone but not unless its below 250$ or something like that...And maybe something new, something better than iPhone will pop up by then.
Good marketing by Apple though.
Koing - Wednesday, July 4, 2007 - link
to pick the 4GB instead of the 8GB version! :PaGoGo - Wednesday, July 4, 2007 - link
http://www.unwiredview.com/2007/07/04/htc-omni-pic...">HTC OmniIf Steve was holding this phone a million idiot will be standing in line from now till October :p