Apple's iPhone: The Future is Here
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 2, 2007 6:13 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Syncing on a Mac and on a PC
There's this group of people that absolutely hate iTunes as an application, while I don't find myself in that category my feelings on the application are as follows:
By no means is iTunes the best application in the world, and honestly it's not nearly one of Apple's greatest efforts, but it's the easiest thing to use to sync with your iPod (and now iPhone) and thus I make do. If you asked how I'd make it better I wouldn't be able to give you a straight answer, I just know that iTunes isn't the pinnacle of simplicity that Apple has achieved with other apps.
Using iTunes to activate your iPhone is a brilliant idea; I absolutely hate sales pitches when it comes to anything technology related, and I know very few people that love going through the process of signing up for a new cell phone plan. You buy your iPhone and the rest you do from the comfort of your own chair, on your own terms.
The setup process is simple and works the same on Macs and PCs, all you need is iTunes 7.3. Input some personal information, including your SSN (assuming you didn't get a credit check at your AT&T store and were given a special code) and you're off to selecting your plan:
Like many on launch day, I got an error telling me that my activation would take longer to process but I eventually got a confirmation email with my new number.
Despite being an application originally made primarily for MP3 organization, iTunes does a good job of acting as a sync manager. First of all, if you've got an iPod chances are that you've got iTunes installed, in which case moving to the iPhone doesn't require any additional software. Secondly, you just tell it what you want to sync and in some cases where your content is located, and voila it's copying data over to your iPhone.
You don't have to eject or do anything special to disconnect your iPhone, just pull it out of its dock and you stop the sync. My single complaint about iTunes as the iPhone's sync manager is that as soon as you plug in your iPhone, iTunes switches to it within the application. Normally Apple does a good job of not letting other applications or dialog box steal focus unless you give it to them, but iTunes' handling of the iPhone just isn't one of those situations.
iTunes, stop demanding my attention
It's not a huge problem but it's one worth complaining about (just like the iPhone's SMS application isn't ground breaking, but it's worth praising). Don't misunderstand, iTunes itself doesn't steal focus under OS X, but within the application focus switches automatically. If I'm scrolling through some MP3s, realize I forgot to plug in my iPhone and rectify the situation, iTunes will kick me out of my MP3 library and make me look at its iPhone screen. Great.
iTunes looks out for you
I'm actually surprised at how well the syncing process works under Windows, it's virtually identical to it under OS X. Granted you don't have iPhoto, but iTunes will sync to Outlook just like it does to Mail under OS X. The biggest issue by far is that the iPhone presently doesn't support 64-bit versions of Windows. Maybe Apple has a thing or two to learn about the PC community, but generally the early adopter crowd is what you'll find spending $500 - $600 on a new phone and there's a chance that those same people may have a few extra GB of memory in their system. Just a hunch.
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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