David Hurst

I resisted buying the first incarnation of the iPhone, due to the lack of 3G, which always seemed utterly bizarre in a “breakthrough communications device”. That, and the non-subsidised price ensured that my cash stayed firmly in my pocket. Both of these issues were resolved with the iPhone 3G, so I have relented and bought one, and after living with it for a few weeks, I think I’m in a position to write a review.

I think it’s important to remember that the iPhone is primarily a mobile phone, so I think it’s appropriate to judge it first of all on that basis. So, what do we need from a phone? Quick and easy dialling; an easy to use contacts list; portability; battery life; signal strength, and; call quality. Let’s see how it measures up on each of these points…

Quick and easy dialling
Most phones on the market have a series of number buttons, and making a call is no more complicated than pressing the buttons for the number you want and hitting the dial button. The iPhone has no buttons. To make a one-off call, we have to press the home button, slide the “button” to activate the screen, press the home button again if we’re not already at the home screen, tap the phone icon, tap the number pad icon if it’s not already selected and finally we can dial the number. It doesn’t take that long, but it’s not exactly quick and I can’t help but wonder how that might affect someone trying to call the emergency services when in dire need of emergency assistance.

I’m happy to trade off speed of dialling with all the additional features I get with iPhone, but not all users will feel the same.

Having said that, most calls will be to someone in your contact list, and the iPhone makes this nice and easy to do. You can also assign contacts as favourites, and these appear in their own shortcut list.

Easy to use contacts list
I can’t fault the contacts list at all. It’s easy to use, and allows you to store multiple numbers per contact, and all sorts of other useful information too. Adding and editing the data is easy on the iPhone, but as it syncs up with your computer, you can just add all your contacts there more quickly and then they will just appear on the iPhone. If you subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe service, they sync across all your computers and the iPhone.

You can add photos to contacts, much like you can with any modern handset, but I like the way these are also synced up and applied to emails as well as phone calls. I like the way you can also add custom fields of your own, and these are remembered so that you can use them across multiple contacts.

Grouping contacts and sending messages to groups is also possible, as is setting individual ring tones for each contact or groups of contacts.

Portability
The iPhone is lightweight, and surprisingly compact considering all the features it has, but there are certainly lighter and smaller handsets on the market. Given that most people will buy the iPhone partly because of the way it looks, I don’t think many prospective purchasers will spend too much time thinking about its portability.

It is worth thinking about how expensive the iPhone is, and how easily it could get damaged. It would be pretty easy for the iPhone to slip out of sweaty hands, hit the floor, and end up horribly scratched and disfigured. A case is essential! The one I have is a bit fiddly, and getting the iPhone extracted before the caller has hung up can be a bit of a challenge.

Battery life
This is a really important aspect of a mobile phone - after all, you can’t be very mobile if you have to plug it in all the time. Surely though, this won’t be a problem with an Apple product, not if their laptop battery performance is anything to go by anyway. So, how is the iPhone 3G battery life?

Crap.

There’s no other way to describe it. If you use the features of your iPhone regularly, you just won’t make it through the day without a charger and convenient power point. Mine is perpetually plugged in when I’m at home or in the office, and I’ve now taken to carrying a pay-as-you-go handset with me when I’m out and about, just in case the battery fails.

You can’t buy an extended battery. You can’t buy a second battery. You can’t even open the iPhone to get at the battery. When you consider that rechargeable batteries have a life span of around 500 full charges, I have to wonder if it will even last out my 18 month contract before it has to go to Apple to be replaced.

This is a very serious fault that needs addressing. I’m fed up with seeing the red battery icon.

Signal strength and call quality
I can’t fault either of these things. The phone is quite happy making reliable calls even on just 1 bar of service. Clarity of speech is excellent.
Now, it’s time to look at the iPhone’s additional features. Bearing in mind that Apple are trying to capture some of the corporate market, the iPhone 3G will be competing head to head with XDAs, Blackberrys and Smart Phones, so how does it hold up?

Connectivity
Pretty important for the internet and push email features of the iPhone 3G, and I have to say it is brilliant. It switches seamlessly between GPRS EDGE, 3G and WiFi, automically picking the fastest/cheapest connection within range. Internet browsing on 3G is perfectly acceptable, although you probably wouldn’t want to browse YouTube or any other high bandwidth sites.

National 3G coverage is pretty good and most major towns and cities have good 3G signals. There’s plenty of free WiFi around too, so getting online is never really a problem with the iPhone 3G.

Internet
The Safari browser on the iPhone is certainly the best browser I have ever used on a mobile device. You can open multiple windows, and easily zoom in on any part of the screen. The keyboard only appears when needed, and the iPhone neatly detects the orientation of the device in your hand and displays pages in portrait or landscape format accordingly.

That said, it does have limitations. You can only open 5 windows, and if you switch between the windows a lot, you will notice a rather odd bug where the window you switch to will load the content from the window you switched from, rather than showing the content you wanted to see. It’s bizarre and Apple need to sort it out.

There’s also no Flash support. Apple have been rapped by the ASA and forced to change their TV commercials as Flash is an important part of the Internet, and the iPhone 3G simply won’t display it.

Email and push functionality
The email client is excellent and supports all the major standards perfectly. When the iPhone first syncs with your computer, it will automatically import the email settings and set it all up for you - utterly painless. It makes most sense to use IMAP, Exchange or MobileMe with such a device so that your email syncs up. MobileMe is great, but there is an annual fee for the service, and it really warrants its own review. I think the big draw of the iPhone 3G, particularly for corporate users, will be the Exchange support.

For most users, the Exchange setup will be simple and painless, but for some, it will be difficult. I don’t think this is particularly a fault of the iPhone, it has more to do with Exchange and the plethora of different possible configurations. I couldn’t get my iPhone 3G to sync with my Exchange server as we use Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2003, which doesn’t have the right service pack for Exchange as standard. Once upgraded, it worked perfectly and now my email is pushed directly to my iPhone. (I have written a guide elsewhere on my blog on how to get connected with SBS. Do a search in the box above if you need help.)

In fact, everything now syncs perfectly. My work email and calendar syncs with Exchange. My home calendar, email and contacts all sync with MobileMe. I have everything I need in the palm of my hand and then replicated across my iMac, MacBook Pro and Windows laptop. Perfect!

Camera
Many people are concerned with having a great camera in their phone. If that’s the case, then you will be disappointed with the iPhone camera. The resolution is poor and taking photos is fiddly, particularly self portraits. On the Mac, iPhoto opens every time I connect my iPhone and tries to import my iPhone photos. This is a pain in the butt. Frankly, I don’t want to take photos on my phone. I have a camera.

Horses and courses of course, but I’m sure Apple could do better here. Surely a forward facing camera would be sensible on a 3G device? Have Apple missed an opportunity with video calling?

iPod
More and more phone handsets now have MP3 players built in. Again, I have an iPod for my music, and using my phone for music is not my first preference, but if you’re going to have a music player and phone together, this is the one you want. The iPhone has all the same features as the iPod touch, with a beautiful coverflow system for browsing your music by album cover. It works well, and I must confess that I have loaded some tunes on to listen to at the gym.

In fact, you can also load full movies onto your iPhone, and in the USA you can actually rent movies on the iTunes store. For some reason, in the UK you cannot yet do this, which is pretty poor.

The real problem is…

Memory
The iPhone has no memory card slot. Presumably this would have detracted from the smooth lines of the gadget, but this just smacks of form over function to me. I have the 8Gb version, mainly because I refused to pay the outrageous additional cost for one with slightly more memory. Flash RAM is cheap. Why not allow users to expand their device as they wish?

GPS
A very welcome addition to the second generation iPhone is GPS. This hooks up seamlessly with the Google maps application to show you exactly where you are anywhere in the world. The iPhone can also triangulate your rough position from cell towers if it can’t see any satellites. The application does provide step-by-step directions, but it does not actually direct you through each step like a vehicle sat nav system. It seems to me that it wouldn’t take much to add this, and then with the help of a car cradle, you could make better use of the GPS. No doubt this would also dramatically boost iPhone sales.

Office documents
The iPhone has viewers for all the main Office document types, but you cannot edit the files. This is a huge disappointment as every other smart phone, XDA, or PDA I’ve tried has had this capability. Apple could easily resolve this, and I’m very surprised that they have not provided a mobile version of their brilliant iWork office suite.

Files
I am rather staggered by the complete lack of any sort of file storage or browsing functionality on the iPhone. OS X, upon which the iPhone interface is built, has Finder - the best file broswing and searching system of any modern OS, and yet the iPhone has nothing. I can’t copy files over to the device and organise them, and Apple has missed a serious trick here. I still need to carry my USB flash drive around with me. Very annoying.

Applications
One of the great features of the iPhone 3G is the downloadable applications. Be warned though that the quality of the apps is wide and varied. Some are fantastic (Apple’s HoldEm poker game for instance), but there are many utterly rubbish third party apps, some of which cost money, so you need to pay attention to the application rating and reviews before splashing the cash. The Apps feature does add serious capability to the iPhone, and the SDK that Apple provides for developers is excellent, so expect to see better things from the App store in the future.

The applications highlight another limitation with the iPhone: that of multi-tasking. It doesn’t have any. You can only run one application at a time, which makes things like mobile MSN, iChat or Skype completely impractical. This is something they may solve with a future software update - I certainly hope so.

Interface
The touch screen interface really needs to be seen (and touched) to be believed. It is truly stunning. The keyboard in particular is worthy of mention. With the “buttons” on screen for the keyboard being very small, it is very easy (and common) to make typos. However, the iPhone is extremely clever at working out what you wanted to type and automatically correcting this for you. Unlike T9 predictive text messaging systems, it is reliable, accurate and rarely gets in the way, which allows you to type quickly and with confidence.

The iPhone also boasts two accelerometers (is that spelled right?) which detect movement, and this means you can play games like Super Monkey Ball by actually moving the iPhone around in your hands. I hope to see some more innovative use of these features in future Applications.

Summary
The iPhone is not perfect, and it is not far enough ahead of the competition to warrant their being excluded from consideration. It’s not for everybody. I can live with the niggles because the overall package is so good, but the battery life really riles me. I can’t understand why it is so poor. I would rather have a slightly thicker iPhone and a much longer battery life if such an option existed.

As an everyday work tool, the iPhone works well. Invariably, the average worker will have it plugged into their computer or car regularly through the day, and therefore the battery won’t be too much of a problem. In a purely social setting though, the iPhone doesn’t make as much sense. There are other handsets with Internet, better cameras and better battery life. Whether or not their better features will be enough to overcome the draw of the iPhone’s sheer beauty and desirability is another question.

If the battery was good, I would score the iPhone 9 out of 10, with the dropped point for the lack of Office software and file browsing. With the shoddy battery, I can only give it a 7 out of 10, and I think I might have been better waiting for the 3rd generation.