Apple's iPhone: The Future is Here
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 2, 2007 6:13 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Safari
The iPhone has four major functions, all of which are lined up along the bottom of the home screen. You've heard the keynote by now, it's a phone, it's an email client, it's an iPod and its a web browser. The iPhone ships with a port of Safari 3, and does actually make web surfing bearable on a mobile phone.
The problem with web surfing on most mobile phones is that the screens are so small that there's no reasonable way to display an entire web page. The manufacturers make a tradeoff and attempt to display the page at full resolution, forcing you to scroll around to find what you want. Site owners, in turn, create mobile-friendly versions of their websites that are basically long pages of text so you can at least read the content on a crippled browser.
By doing away with any sort of fixed input device, Apple freed up a lot of real estate on the iPhone for a huge screen. So why not try to display an entire website, just scaled down on this gorgeous screen? That's exactly what the iPhone does.
You get a zoomed out version of the same website you'd see on your computer, and using the same double tap/stretch/pinch gestures you can zoom in and navigate around the website. Double tapping can sometimes get annoying in Safari, if you accidentally double tap on a link, which is where the stretch gesture is useful. When you zoom in on a page the actual zooming process is quick, but there's about a one second delay before the website is usable again as the page is re-rendered in the new resolution. During this delay, nothing works, gestures, scrolling, clicking, etc... It's frustrating because the rest of the UI is so fast and responsive that whenever it stops it's even more pronounced.
Page rendering is also an issue; while a web page is loading you basically can't do anything else on the screen. For example, trying to scroll while a page is loading will either result in you not being able to scroll, or a choppy half scroll that stops abruptly. You're far better off waiting for the page to load before trying to proceed. Even trying to hit the X button to stop loading a page can take some time to process.
Expect to see this screen a lot
The problem is that even over WiFi (and especially over Edge), web pages can take a long time to fully render, and when the rest of the OS runs so smoothly it's frustrating to be in any situation where it doesn't. Just because you're on WiFi you shouldn't expect to get notebook-speed performance when loading web pages. My guess is that we're fairly CPU bound here, possibly compounded by a lack of system memory.
The vast majority of sites I visited had no problems with mini Safari 3 on the iPhone, although occasionally I'd run into a site that had issues with a background repeating itself too many times. There is no Flash or Java support, so expect to see many missing elements on websites (but on the bright side, it's like free ad-block right?).
AnandTech in my palm
Entering in URLs is very easy, you get a slightly different virtual keyboard in Safari than you do in other apps on the iPhone. There's no spacebar, but you have dedicated / and .com keys. There's no www. key but for most URLs you can just leave that part off and you'll be ok. Typing .net, .org or any other non-com TLDs can be frustrating since you don't have a one touch way of getting to those, but luckily Safari keeps a great history of previously visited URLs. Just typing "ana" in the address bar brings up AnandTech and a couple articles I visited while testing the iPhone.
One annoyance is that there's no quick way to bring up the address bar while on a web page; you have to scroll up to the top of the page to find the address bar, which can be a problem once again if the page isn't done rendering, making scrolling a little tough. Update: Thanks to a number of AnandTech readers, I now know a work-around for my Safari quirk. If you're at the bottom of a page in Safari, where the address bar isn't visible, simply tapping the top of the screen (where the time is) will take you to the top revealing, you guessed it, the address bar. Thanks to all who commented/wrote in, you've made my iPhone experience a little better :)
Multi-window browsing is supported on the iPhone, simply tap the icon in the lower right hand corner and select New Window to open a new browser window. You can also flip through open browser windows in this view, but once you open a couple windows the contents of the inactive ones are dumped from memory and simply reloaded when you switch back. Apple clearly made the iPhone as conservative as possible with its memory management.
Given that there is no copy/paste support, the only way to share something interesting with your friends/family/co-workers is to email them the URL. If you click on the address bar there's an option to "Share" the URL, which opens up an email window with the active URL pasted into the message body.
Safari on the iPhone is good, easily the best mobile browsing experience on any device this size and light years better than its closest competitors, but it needs work. I suspect that many of the problems will simply take software optimization and faster hardware to correct, but they are solvable and this is a step in the right direction.
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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.