Apple's iPhone: The Future is Here
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 2, 2007 6:13 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Image attachments are scaled and visible in-line, while PDFs, Word and Excel documents are visible by launching a viewer window.
Lots of attachments, too bad there's no Powerpoint viewer
The process is seamless, if you see an attachment you can open simply click on it and if it's not already downloaded, it'll download and open in a new window; just close the window when you're done and you'll return to your email.
This is what an attachment that hasn't been downloaded looks like
The PDF/Word/Excel readers on the iPhone are nice and fast, just like the rest of the UI.
Tell me that's not the best looking PDF on a mobile phone you've ever seen
I didn't have any incompatibilities with PDF and Excel files, but I did run into the following issue with the attachment viewer and a Word document that I fed it:
It turns out that any Pages document (Pages being Apple's own publishing program) exported as a Word document results in this on the iPhone. Normal Word docs open just fine.
A couple of times I'd received an image via email on the iPhone only to find that the file was corrupt. I'd see around 20% of the image inline in the email, but the rest would be a grey box. Re-downloading the email would always fix the problem, and it only seemed to happen over WiFi. A friend of mine had the same problem, also over WiFi, but with an image he sent. The image made its way to its recipient just fine, but in his sent folder it appeared corrupt. I can't seem to duplicate the problem on command, so for now I'll chalk it up to a recurring fluke.
I've also encountered another odd issue where the iPhone on WiFi will stop being able to communicate with anything outside of my local network. Leaving Mail and returning to it a couple of times fixed the issue and it only happened once, but a friend of mine with his own iPhone reported running into the same issue just last night.
Despite its appearances, the iPhone Mail application is really designed to be a passive application. While you can send emails and photos, there is no outbox, sent mail isn't queued. To make matters worse, you can only email one image at a time, so if you're trying to send multiple emails each with their own photo attached on the Edge network, prepared for a frustratingly sequential experience.
Note that there is no way to attach an image within the email application, you have to view the image you want to send in the photo viewer and select the mail to option from there.
There's also no way to save attachments that have been emailed to you, even if they are photos. You can only view the attachments within the Mail client, and if there's an image that someone forwarded you that you'd like to save, you'll have to wait and do so on your computer and sync it to your iPhone if you want it in your photo album.
I get that Apple wanted to keep the iPhone as simple as possible, while remaining quite powerful. Keeping the user totally isolated from the iPhone's file system makes sense in the quest for elegant simplicity, but not being able to save images you received via email on the go seems like a bit much.
Here you can already see a fundamental difference in approach between the Blackberry and iPhone. The Blackberry is designed to all but replace your computer for email, while the iPhone is far more of a companion device.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
85 Comments
View All Comments
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