Apple iPhone (8GB) review

Kent German & Donald Bell CNET

Published: 02 Jul 2007

Exterior features
The iPhone's only hardware menu button is set directly below the display. It takes you instantly back to the home screen no matter what application you're using. The single button is nice to have, since it saves you a series of menu taps if you're buried in a secondary menu. On the top of the iPhone is a multifunction button for controlling calls and the phone's power. If a call comes in at an inopportune time, just press the button once to silence the ringer, or press it twice to send the call to voice mail. Otherwise, you can use this top control to put the phone asleep and wake it up again. You can turn the iPhone off by pressing and holding the button.

Located on the left spine are a volume rocker and a nifty ringer mute switch — something all mobile phones should have and which is a popular feature of Palm Treos. On the bottom end, you'll find a pair of speakers and the jack for the syncing dock and the charger cable. Unfortunately, the headset jack on the top end is deeply recessed, which means you will need an adapter for any headphones with a chubby plug. Is this customer-friendly? No.

Unfortunately, the Phone does not have a battery that a user can replace. That means you have to send the iPhone to Apple to replace the battery after it's spent (Apple is estimating one battery will last for 300 to 400 charges — probably less than two years' worth of use). No, you don't really need a removable battery in a mobile phone, but like many things missing on the iPhone, it would be nice to have, especially for such an expensive phone.

Contrary to earlier reports, the SIM card is removable via a small drawer on the top of the iPhone. However, it's unclear whether you'll be able to swap SIM cards in and out of the iPhone. If you can't, it's troubling, as it completely defeats the biggest advantage of using a GSM phone with a SIM card. Some people have multiple phones and like to change the SIM card between their different handsets. Also, if you can't swap SIM cards in and out, you won't be able to import contact information from another handset.

Features
The iPhone's phone book is limited only by the phone's available memory. Each contact holds eight phone numbers, email, web site and street addresses, a job title and department, a nickname, a birthdate and notes. You can't save callers to groups, but you can store your preferred friends to a favourites menu for easy access. You can assign contacts a photo for caller ID and assign them one of 25 polyphonic ringtones. We should note, however, that there's no voice dialling and you can't use MP3 files as ringtones. Other basic features include an alarm clock, a calculator, a world clock, a stopwatch, a timer and a notepad. There's a vibrate mode but it's a tad light.

The calendar offers day and month views, and you can use the calendar as an event reminder or a to-do list as well. The interface is clean and simple, although inputting new appointments involves a lot of tapping. There's no week view, however. Stay tuned for a report on Outlook syncing with contacts and calendar.

Bluetooth and wireless
The iPhone offers a full range of wireless functionality with support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. The Wi-Fi compatibility is especially welcome, and a feature that's absent on far too many smartphones. When you're browsing the web, the iPhone automatically searches for the nearest internet hot spot. Bluetooth 2.0 is also on board, which delivers faster transmission and a longer range than Bluetooth 1.2. You also get a range of profiles including file transfer, but an A2dP stereo Bluetooth profile is not among them — another item that's not necessary but would be nice to have.

Although Apple CEO Steve Jobs has explained the iPhone's lack of 3G support by saying the chipsets take up too much room and drain too much battery, we'd like the option anyway. Yes, the Wi-Fi network is great when you can get it, but AT&T's EDGE network just doesn't cut it for all other surfing. EDGE web browsing is so slow, it almost ruins the pretty web interface. More on this to come.

Messaging and email
For your messaging needs, the iPhone offers text messaging and email. As on many smartphones, a text message thread is displayed as one long conversation — a useful arrangement that allows you to pick which messages you'd like to answer. If you use another function while messaging, you can return to pick up that message where you left off. We just don't understand, however, why Apple doesn't include multimedia messaging. Sure, you can use email to send photos, but without multimedia messaging you can't send photos to other mobile phones — pretty much the entire point of a camera phone.

The iPhone's email menu includes integrated support for Yahoo, Gmail (Google Mail), AOL and Mac accounts. You can set up the phone to receive messages from other IMAP4 and POP3 systems, but at the time of writing corporate Exchange server compatibility is unclear. Check back in the next couple days for a full report. You can read — but not edit — PDF, JPEG, Word and Excel documents. Worse: you can't cut and paste text when composing messages.

 

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