Protension: the online journal of Tom Elgin

(big surprise)

Review summary – Apple has created a little 3″ digital device that does almost everything, uses only your fingers as input, and has no instruction manual… and it works without an instruction manual.

Everyone knows the feature list, so I’m going to play Mr. Negative and tell you what it doesn’t do.

The three most ridiculous shortcomings are:

• Can’t use songs as ringtones or alarms. Are you kidding?
• No IM capabilities (just SMS). No AIM, iChat, ICQ, nada. Wonder if a web interface for any of these would work thru iPhone Safari?
• No scientific calculator. Silly. The widgets in general suck as much as the Mac OS X widgets do (calc, clock, weather, stocks, notes).

Other negatives:

• Mail Sync only syncs your account settings, not your current emails (the only emails you get are the ones iPhone downloads — you can download them all, 25 at a time).
• EDGE is slow. The biggest BS I read on the internet is that Apple chose EDGE “instead of” 3G because EDGE has better availability, lower power reqs, etc. I don’t think there exists a 3G device that isn’t also EDGE or at least GPRS compatible, so “availability” is not an issue. Better explanation might be Qualcomm lawsuit issues and/or physical space (it blows me away what they’ve crammed into this thing — this is a much bigger leap than the first iPod was).
• When your wi-fi connection fails, it doesn’t auto-revert to EDGE… you have to turn wi-fi off and then try again [edit: if wi-fi disconnects it reverts to EDGE… if wi-fi has a connection but DNS or something else fails, you have to turn wi-fi off to get EDGE].
• EQ is as annoying to get to and adjust as it is on the iPod.
• Mail has no way to select multiple items. This is a pain when you have a POP account that gets spam in 10-message batches and you don’t want the home page to constantly remind you that you have 10 unread messages (and don’t want to click each one to get rid of’em).
• Mail settings are universal — no way to set “Automatically CC me on all sent emails” for one account and not another.
• No contextual menus. Come on, a two-finger tap, or a tap-vertical-slide would be the perfect trigger for this. The gestures potential for iPhone is enormous. (aside – all Mac users with a 3+ button mouse need xGestures)
• The on-screen mini-keyboard sucks. I haven’t used smartphone before so this is a guess — it sucks slightly less than other mini-keyboards.
• No GPS. Not that fitting one in would be physically possible.
• Occasionally doesn’t register a “click”
• The camera is a cell-phone camera (crappy). You’ll note Apple didn’t sell this as 4-in-1 “iPod, Internet Comm, Phone, and Digital Camera”
• Calendar is better than iCal (not saying much). I need to find a way to sync this to an Exchange calendar to have any use for it.
• Guess what, YouTube is unusable on EDGE. Web browsing on EDGE is OK for text-heavy sites including Wikipedia.
• As far as I can tell you only get 2 ringing profiles – “silent/vibrate” and “not silent/vibrate” (the profiles I use regularly on my old moto are silent/vibrate/soft/loud/vibe-then-ring). You can set ringtones per-contact at least (but not using songs).
• Unlimited data is free but SMS costs if you go over 200/mo. Use smseverywhere.com or Yahoo SMS in iPhone Safari??
• Safari crashed once for no apparent reason (not a complicated webpage). Seems to have fixed (reset, lost session) itself before I could find instructions to reset it. [For reference – press and hold home button for 5secs from within the frozen app]
• Safari search options are Google or Yahoo. No Wikipedia, etc.
• Mail app didn’t find my subfolders in my inbox folder (IMAP account). This is an issue for me; hopefully I’ll fix it [update: fixed by setting IMAP path prefix].
• Mail can view MSWord attachments, but doesn’t show red-lining from “Track Changes”

Cool things that I wasn’t expecting:

• CoverFlow isn’t as useless as I would’ve thought
• It remembers where you were very well. After call or sleep it pops up right where you were. Also when you open iPod, Safari, Google Maps, etc., they show the last thing you looked at in that app (map/playlist/webpage(s)/etc). Not in Photos.
• Overall the UI is pretty hard to find fault with, which is unheard-of for a cell phone, much less a smartphone. No letdown there.
• The web browser supports multiple windows/sessions.
• It supports VPN. Cool. And of course SSL for mail and everything.
• The built-in speaker is impressive for its size.
• It remembers separate volume level for music, phone call, and speakerphone (if you turn volume up on a call, the volume reverts to what it was when the music resumes after your call).
• Maps shows live traffic info.
• I read a review that said you can only rotate to landscape counter-clockwise. Not true, you can rotate either way. In Pictures, you can rotate 360! (only 90 in Safari/Music). Maps, Calendar, SMS, others don’t rotate.
• The accelerometer is impossible to fool, whether you rotate slow/fast, jerky/smooth.
• “Double-tap to zoom in to fit width of the thing I double-tapped” works surprisingly well.
• You switch between silent/vibrate and ring via a physical 2-way switch on the side… no way to forget which mode you’re in.
• Headphone allows you to pause, skip track, and pick up call from mic button — so I will be able to use this snowboarding this winter (can’t use touchscreen with gloves).
• The screen is really good.
• You can use it while docked (not while syncing)
• Works perfectly with my Alpine car stereo. Doesn’t use car speakers for speakerphone, which would’ve been nice.

Apple’s iPhone Support Forums
iPhone Manual

I bought the iPhone because I was in the market for my first smartphone, UI is very important to me, and I trusted Apple to get it right. It’s only been a few hours but I am not disappointed.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 8:59 AM and is filed under Design, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.