By Julian Prokaza on Tuesday, 11 December 2007
 Given the blanket
coverage bestowed upon it since the 9th
November launch, you’re probably sick to the back teeth of the iPhone by
now. But whatever you think about Apple’s latest gadget, you have to admit that
it must be something special to have garnered quite so much media attention.
After using a UK model on the O2 network for a week, the fact of the matter
is that…. yes, the iPhone is something special. That’s not to say it isn’t without
it’s faults, but it’s perhaps the best smartphone we’ve ever reviewed, but not
for the reasons you might think.
The single overriding reason for the unqualified success of the iPhone as a
smartphone is that it just 'works'. When ascribed to any other manufacturer’s
best handheld effort, “easy to use” presupposes that the user is already familiar
with such PC-centric ideas as clicking, dragging, opening menus and so on, and
that the smartphone in question merely presents such elements in an readily
accessible way.
The problem is that while these conceptual constructs work well when displayed
on a large screen and used with a mouse and full-size keyboard, they tend to
be a wholly inadequate way of interacting with a smartphone. So, while every
mobile operating system from Windows Mobile to Symbian vainly struggles to deliver
a handheld analogue to the Windows Desktop, Apple has had the good sense to
approach the problem from a different perspective. As a result, the iPhone is
so simple and intuitive to use that once you’ve used it for even a few minutes,
you have to wonder what the hell everyone else has been playing at for all these
years.
This being Apple, the stunning industrial design is the first thing to strike
you about the iPhone and it’s a device that feels as good as it looks. Like the near-identical iPod Touch, the iPhone has a sleek
aluminium case that feels satisfyingly solid and the blank front surface neatly sidesteps
the mild technophobia that other button-bedecked handsets can induce. The single
button on the front of the case turns the iPhone on and almost all of its other
functions are accessed via icons on the wonderfully vibrant screen.
The screen is glass rather than plastic, and the feel of an unyielding surface
under a fingertip is far superior to the flexible plastic films used by other
touch-screens. And a fingertip is the only way to control the iPhone – it won’t
respond to anything else. Fortunately, the interface has been sympathetically
designed to work perfectly with a fleshy digit and the innovative multi-touch
technology that underpins it is remarkably accurate at determining what you’re
touching.
The screen does pick up greasy marks like a magnet attracts iron filings, but
that just provides an excuse to give the screen a bit of a polish (and yes,
there is a cloth in the box). A complete absence of such familiar on-screen
paraphernalia as menus and scroll bars is disorientating at first, but it soon
becomes second nature. The display only shows controls that are relevant to
the task in hand, usually in the form of large, clearly labelled buttons.
Scrolling is simply a matter of swiping the screen with a finger and the clever
use of animation creates the impression that you’re pushing around solid objects
that obey the laws of physics rather than just changing the colour of pixels.
It’s really something that you have to try to fully appreciate, but it makes
the iPhone so refreshingly simple to use that other stylus-led handheld operating
systems seem quaint by comparison. Multi-touch is less successful when it comes
to text entry, but that’s largely the result of the on-screen keyboard’s lack
of tactile feedback.
The iPhone does employ some ingenious methods that help it work out what words
you’re typing based on the keys being pressed (whether they’re mis-keys or not),
but this doesn’t catch every typo. Two-thumbed typing is possible with practice,
but it takes longer to reach this level of skill than with a traditional smartphone
thumb-board. Still, the iPhone’s minor input issues are far outweighed by its
smorgasbord of other clever touches.
The Safari web browser is best on any handheld and its ability to zoom from
a full-page view to exactly the right part of the page you want with a couple
of taps on the screen is very impressive. More ingenious still are the motion
sensors that rotate the display when the iPhone is turned on its side, giving
a widescreen view of web pages and photos. Such similarly thoughtful touches
abound on the iPhone, from the light sensor that adjusts screen brightness according
to ambient light, to the proximity sensor that disables the screen when the
iPhone is brought near your face to make a call.And, of course, it’s also the
best iPod ever, packing all the same features as the iPod Touch (though not
the same commodious capacity).
As critics have been quick to point out, as impressive as these features are,
the iPhone’s base specification doesn’t offer much that can’t be found in smartphones
from a year or two ago. Such complaints are missing the point, though -- it’s
not what the iPhone does but how it does it that’s so groundbreaking. Sure,
3G would be nice but the seamless transition between Wi-Fi and EDGE connections
according to what’s available makes web browsing as painless as on a broadband
PC.
Threaded SMS chat and the switch on the side of the case that silences the
ringer may have first appeared on the Palm Treo 600 in 2004, but Apple is the
only manufacturer to recognise the value of such features since. There is one
unique innovation that Apple does particular deserve kudos for, though – visual
voicemail. Rather than force you to sit through voicemail messages in the order
they were received, the iPhone displays the caller’s details on-screen and you
can playback and delete messages in any order you like.
Unfortunately, for all its incredible features, the inability to install third-party
applications makes the iPhone far less capable than any (admittedly far less
usable) Windows Mobile or Blackberry device. The supplied applications are good
(woefully inadequate calendar aside), but they don’t provide nearly enough smartphone
functionality for our liking. The release of the software development kit early
next year should remedy this, but quite what it will enable developers to produce
remains to be seen.
More problematic is the price. £269 for the 8Gb iPhone is certainly fair for
the level of sophistication on offer, but the subsequent £35 a month you must
pay for O2’s cheapest tariff is not. 200 inclusive minutes and texts a month
help sweeten the deal, as does ‘unlimited’ data access, but there’s not getting
away from the fact that you’ll have paid at least £899 over the course of the
18 month contract. After living with the iPhone for a week, we have to grudgingly
admit that it’s almost worth it and it’s only the lack of third-party application support that prevents us from giving it an unequivocal thumbs-up.
Apple iPhone (O2)
| Price |
£269 |
| Rating |
5 out of 6 |
| Good |
Stunning good looks; slick, elegant operation |
| Bad |
O2 contract is expensive |
| Manufacturer |
Apple |
| Buy from |
O2 |
Specifications
| Smartphones |
| Operating system |
OS X |
| Processor |
Unknown |
| System memory |
n/a |
| User memory |
8Gb |
| Screen |
3.5in (320 x 480) |
| Bands |
850, 900, 1800, 1900MHz, GSM, GPRS, EDGE |
| Camera |
2 megapixel |
| Connectivity |
802.11g, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, |
| Other |
iPod functions,
iPhone Dock |
| Quoted battery life |
8h talk-time, 250h standby, 24h music playback,
7h video playback |
| Size |
115 x 61 x 11.6mm |
| Weight |
135g |
|
