After the storm, iPhone reviewed
iPhone has been in the mobile phone industry for over an year now. Amidst very heavy critical reviewing it has carved a niche for itself which has been because it is no nonsense device built on principles that it should complicate the way the phone would be used. Built with just 4 buttons and a huge 3.5” screen, the phone is easy to use over for a very tech-phobic of users.
But this in no way means that it is not made for tech-freaks. It packs amazing graphical effects, animations, transitions and many industry’s firsts in small compact package which has no opening slots. The device is sealed tightly with perfection up to the minutest detail with the beautiful black colored front body panel fitting seamlessly into the aluminum casing which seals the phone from sides and back. The finish is flawless. The feel of the glass is simply superb across the 3.5 inch huge touch screen. Everything in the iPhone is hidden like the antenna and the sim card slot tucked inside on top of the instrument. On the left of the sim card slot is a 3.5mm audio jack. Though it is common in industry, but the way apple has designed it, most of the generic audio jacks won’t fit in it except the standard iPod connectors. On the bottom is the iport which is used to charge the iPhone and sync it with the computer via dock provided. The dock, just like iPhone is of superb quality.
Let’s discuss the interface of iPhone. It runs on resolution of 480×320pixels which makes the images feel very real due to high pixel density of 160ppi. The standby screen displays almost all the applications which the phone has. With the most basic telephony related apps down in the bar like Phone dialer, messaging, safari web browser and iPod audio player. The interaction is through multi tap and gestures like drag for scrolling through the display, single tap to select item, double tap to zoom in and out in almost al applications except photographs and pinch un-pinching of fingers for zooming in and out of photos. Though even after the 16GB version of iPhone has been released and many firmware upgrades have been given, the interface still remains sort of buggy. The input to the phone is through a virtual on screen keyboard only, which though is having set of very big keys, but it’s not possible to bring the keys in landscape mode for typing which could have been better for using the keys stretched over the entire screen. But honestly speaking, the keyboard of iPhone lets down because speed of typing on a hardware keyboard is just not possible on the virtual keyboard and with lot of missing symbols like period from the alphabetic view of the keyboard, you have to open the symbol list a lot many times.
One of the major drawbacks in iPhone is that it still can’t work on 3G networks. The EDGE support for AT&T network is good, but when you make a call you can’t use data and vice versa, data speeds are not worth to be talked about as when the review was being done, opening of youtube on the safari browser was a very bad experience, sometimes the video loaded and after 10-15seconds of buffering it displayed warning that the video is unavailable. Call quality is also not bad, but people who had been using 3G based services would find the difference pinching.
The iPod application inside it is great and similar to legendary iPod, with such a giant touchscreen, the easy to use iPod interface has been made more user-friendly. Going through the videos in album cover mode is such a beautiful experience. The audio quality is as best as a standalone iPod. The best thing about the iPhone is its battery backup. It plays whopping 9 hours continues video which is currently not possible for any other mobile handset. And Apple claims that it can play almost 29 hours of continues music which is much more than any of the iPod on the shelf. The other features like the world clock, notepad, and calculator are very easy to use. The settings window of the iPhone is quite simple as compared to other WM or Symbian based smart phones. The Bluetooth, wifi are very easy to use and often require least of the user input for doing most basic of the settings. It’s only when the user has to put the password or select a network from multiple networks, that iPhone bothers to ask user for input.
The camera is the black sheep of the device. The 2 megapixel fixed focus camera doesn’t has any user modifiable settings at all. No exposure control, no zoom, no mode selection just nothing! But the still picture quality is good if not excellent. However video capturing makes a lot more to be expected from iPhone. The frame rates are mere 7-10fps, comparing it with 30fps of N96 launched by Nokia makes it look technically challenged.
Overall the phone is excellent and sorts of revolution in market as it created a race of so called iPhone “killers”. The phone does best for what it is designed for: ease of use. Though it lacks a lot of basic features which users require from phones, which hopefully apple would address with their firmware releases. The phone comes in with 2 year contract from AT&T.
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