Apple's iPhone: The Future is Here
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 2, 2007 6:13 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Using it as a Phone
Early on in what I'll call the camera-phone boom, someone clever came up with the complaint that there are no phones out there that just make phone calls well. They all have poor camera interfaces, are mediocre MP3 players and do a boatload of other things without having actually perfected making phone calls. As infuriating as it may sound, Apple's $500 iPhone actually fills the phone call niche quite well.
The only UI downside to using the iPhone as a phone is that you need to first click on the phone button at the bottom of the screen before you can access its ability to place phone calls. Obviously incoming calls can be received at any point, but if you actually want to dial out you have to hit that little green button first.
The iPhone is the perfect melding of your address book and a mobile phone. You have four options for dialing out on the iPhone, you can dial from a list of your favorite numbers, you can look at your call log, you can dial from your address book or do it the old fashioned way with the keypad.
If you're kickin' it old school, the keypad is absolutely enormous, something you don't find on the vast majority of mobile phones, and a true testament to Apple's idea of a morphing interface. In keypad mode, all you need on the screen is a gigantic keypad, having a virtual interface makes that possible.
Dialing from your address book is just as simple as playing an MP3 on the iPhone, flick your finger up or down to find the contact, click on it and click on the number you'd like to call (e.g. work, home or mobile). Admittedly the contact list took some getting used to (I'm still not totally comfortable with it) being that the names on the screen are so large compared to what I'm used to on the Blackberry. In a way it seems like I'm lost trying to find the person I'm looking for since I'm so used to using a scroll wheel or trackball to navigate through a huge list of much smaller fonts.
The recents view is your call log; it logs incoming, outgoing and missed calls. Missed calls are colored red, and you can also view them separately by tapping missed at the top of the screen. The interface doesn't distinguish between incoming and outgoing calls until you click the little blue arrow to the right of the call.
A call log done right
Multiple calls to/from the same person within close proximity in time are grouped together, with the number of calls placed in parentheses. Selecting additional details about any group of calls will tell you exactly when the calls took place. None of this data is unique to the iPhone, the Blackberry and Blackjack both offer it, but neither competitor presents it in such a clean and easily accessible way.
Your favorites are basically your speed dial numbers, for those contacts that you call/harass oh so frequently, it's just one touch to call from this list.
Steve Jobs' visual voicemail demo at Macworld was one of the things that really got me excited about the iPhone, it was voicemail done right. In practice, it works just like you'd expect it to.
When you get a voicemail your iPhone will vibrate and the phone icon at the home screen will get a little 1 next to it, indicating that you have one unchecked message of some sort (either a missed call, or in this case a voicemail).
The voicemail interface is super simple, you're presented with a list of people who have left you messages and you can listen to them in any order. No calling a weird number and dealing with an automated voicemail system; your voicemail is handled the way it is done on any VoIP platform, except this is on your cellphone.
Let's see what Anand left us!
You can even record your voicemail greeting from this interface.
Features like forwarding voicemail simply aren't available from the iPhone and I have no idea how visual voicemail works (or doesn't) if you're roaming on other networks. The iPhone doesn't let you select what GSM/Edge network you're on, so I couldn't force it to join a non AT&T network to see the impact on visual voicemail.
The device isn't ergonomically suited to being held up to your head for prolonged periods of time, if you're going to be having long conversations you'll want to invest in a bluetooth headset. The weight of the device contributes to it being uncomfortable while held up to your ear.
The earpiece gets really warm if you use the WiFi a lot, and putting it up to your ear while on the phone will result in profuse ear-sweats. It's not as hot as the bottom of the MacBook Pro for example; it's warm enough to notice, not to burn.
The speakerphone works well and voice quality is respectable, at least compared to the Blackjack and Blackberry Curve.
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ninjit - Monday, July 2, 2007 - link
Argh, looks like everyone bogged down the image server.I just happened to hit refresh right when the article went live, and was happily reading it for the first 10 pages, but now none of the images are load for page 10 onwards.
grrrr
goinginstyle - Monday, July 2, 2007 - link
I just finished it, took a minute for the last two images to show up. Great article by the way and now I know what to get the wife for her birthday next week.ButterFlyEffect78 - Monday, July 2, 2007 - link
I love my iPhone. I love texting all my friends and showing them my poop. Its great. Thank you Apple.rADo2 - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
This phone is horrible.My needs e.g. are much higher than those offered by $500-600 dumbphone with Apple logo on it.. There are dumbphones on the market for $0 - 29.95, that can do more than iPhone. Take any Nokia phone (and they have MMS, voice dial, and record video)... And there are also many $199 smarpthones with Windows Mobile and/or Symbian UIQ that can install 10,000+ apps, many of them being freeware.
No need to lock yourself in Apple overpriced monopoly with little functionality.
If your needs are simple, and you value Apple logo above all, iPhone may still appeal to you. Why not. But "dumbphones" with many lacking features sold for $500-600 with 2 year contract most certainly do NOT appeal to smart and advanced users.
In fact, biggest disadvantage of iPhone is not even missing features like voice dial, MMS, HW keyboard and/or GPS, but completely missing SDK. Developing SDK and giving it for free to developers is a major expense, and even companies like Nokia or SonyEricsson, which are on the market for "centuries", had problems with it. Microsoft has excellent SDK for Windows Mobile.
Apple has no development platform / SDK. They try to hide this huge shortcomming by saying "Safari is your SDK". Hehe. They can fool "sheeps" that JavaScripts widgets running under Safari are real apps, but not tech people and business people. You cannot code (e.g.) GPS navigation handling 1GB maps, or advanced IM client under JavaScript/HTML/CSS.
Thus their phone is basically a "dumbphone", not a smartphone, as installing native apps is a primary thing that distinguishes dumbphones for smart ones.
Why devote 50+ pages review to something dumb? "Sponzored" by Apple?
michael2k - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
You have to use it to understand, I think.You talk about features, but as the review mentions explicitly, it's the interface, a feature in it's own right, that sells the iPhone. Does any 0-$29.95 have a touchscreen as nice as the iPhones? You kind of have to compare it to other touch screen phones to "get it".
Cygni - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
Exactly. The strength of the iPhone is that it DOESNT have hundreds of features tacked onto it, all done, but none done well. The iPhone does what 95% of the phone buying public wants to do with a phone, and does those functions better than any other phone produced today. That is it strength. That is why its bound to change the way cellphones are made and sold.The reason smartphones havent taken off for a vast majority of the public was that they were simply too dificult to use, big, ugly, and counterintuitive. They were systems of endless ugly windows, with terrible fonts, on grainy screens. They were huge fields of buttons with multiple functions for each key. They tried to do everything. Thats NOT what the majority of phone buyers want in a phone. They want something functional, useable, and enjoyable.
To put it simply, the iPhone does what nearly everyone wants to do on a phone better than anyone else. Anyone who touches it and slides that unlock bar over for the first time has fallen in love. I personally wont be purchasing one for another year, while i wait for my contract with Sprint to expire, and i hope that the second gen has arrived by that time.
How can you justify spending $600 on a phone that doesnt do everything? The average american spends an ABSURD amount of time with their phone, doing standard phone things. Calls, Alarms, Texts. If i can make those hours of my day far more enjoyable for barely the cost of 2 car payments? I would say thats worth it.
rADo2 - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
Well, iPhone SW is poorly done IMHO, e.g. not being able to search through contacts by typing is major drawback. I cannot imagine having to scroll through my 1000 contacts...There are e.g. great Samsung and/or Nokia phones sold for $0-50 (with contract) that are better "dumbphones" than iPhone, have 3G, MMS, can record video, play music on stereo BT headset, etc.
iPhone does lack some very basic features, and I consider it to be hype only. Apple has brilliant advertising and "wow" factor, but this will wear-off within next few weeks.
dborod - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
There is an onscreen alphabet that lets you easily jump to contacts starting with that letter so you don't have to scroll all the way.rADo2 - Thursday, July 5, 2007 - link
Yes, but that is only single letter. WM5/6 devices can do initial search (multiple letters) or even sequantial search, see e.g. http://www.sbsh.net/products/contactbreeze/">http://www.sbsh.net/products/contactbreeze/If you have like 100 contacts beginning with "K", it will be very hard to use iPhone to find and dial the right contact. And voice dial will not hell either.
michael2k - Sunday, July 8, 2007 - link
You make it sound like Apple won't be adding search.To my knowledge Apple has updated/upgraded via firmware every single one of it's iPods.
Why do you think the software on an iPhone is "stuck" the way it is now? I imagine within a month of use, with feedback and real world experience, Apple will release an updated browser, mail client, media client, and text interface.
Then what about your complaints?
The iPhone is, for Apple, a miniature computer, and as such can be updated with fixes and software.