Sunday, February 15, 2009
Trust Apple to build the hype. I’ll bet no one and their uncle can do what Apple did with the iPhone. First call a press conference and give a stylish walk through of the phone features. Jaws on the floor, its Apple, baby. Everyone starts buzzing about the iPhone and how it is going to be a “breakthrough internet and communications device”. Everyone’s waiting for the next big thing after electricity and sliced bread. Everyone wants one. Steve’s rubbing his hands in glee…
The iPhone indeed is a path breaking mobile device and I wouldn’t hesitate to call it one of the best phones in the world.It has its fair share of niggles, but then, which phone doesn’t? Lets take a better look.
Since this is not your usual hum-drum phone, and has many innovative features in it, I would like to talk about them first.
1) Multi-touch
With multi-touch you can flick, pinch AND tap. To zoom out of a photo, pinch, to zoom in, just reverse the pinching action. It senses touches by means of an electrical field and allows very natural actions. Supremely functional and all the girls could say was “WoW!” @ 150dB.
2) OS X
The legendary,sexy Apple OS X on a phone!! You gotta be kidding me! Well, no I’m not. And somehow Apple seem to have got the whole integration very right. Its very multitasking friendly and I only wish there was someway to control all the running applications like on Symbian OS.
3) Accelerometer
This has to be one of the coolest features on the phone! In essence it is a motion sensor, which detects whether the phone is vertical or horizontal. Accordingly it changes the viewing from Portrait to Landscape.(only in apps that support it, mind)
4) Proximity Sensor
This is another cool feature. When you get a call, the screen and your cheek make all sorts of contact, and there might be inadvertent touches. So, in order to avoid that, we have a sensor which, during a call, turns of the touch screen and saves battery. How thoughtful.
Now, if I may have your attention, we shall get on to reviewing the phone as I usually do.
Looks,Design and Build Quality
Apple always makes sure that their products might not always have the best of features but they certainly do have gorgeous looks. Nothing different with the iPhone here. Sleek, sensuous and sophisticated. The smooth curves, the chrome lining, the lightly brushed aluminum finish at the back… its all top notch. It has a solid feel to it and makes for a nice fit in the palm. The heads will turn, don’t worry dahling. And don’t be too surprised if someone comes and gets too chatty with you. Its a conversation starter in every sense of the term.
Input and Output
The beautiful 3.5 inch 480 x 320 multi-touch screen is the primary input as well as output. It is easily the most stunning display i’ve ever seen on a mobile device. Period. Your fingers are the only way to operate it, and its quite the fingerprint magnet. But it is absolutely scratch resistant, and you can use your shirt sleeve or jeans to wipe it off. Better still, get a good screen protector, and life will be much better.
The on-screen keyboard is the way to enter all the numbers and letters. This one is easily the best on-screen keyboard in mobile history and can easily stake claim to be the best substitute for the physical keyboard. The iPhone uses a combination of dictionary and keymap prediction to help out typing.
There arent too many buttons around on the phone. Just a home button on the front(which takes you back to the SpringBoard or the main screen), a volume and a silent switch to the left and a Sleep/Wake button on the top. Thats it. The multi-touch screen will handle all the rest of the inputs, thank you very much. Also, to the top is the SIM card tray. You insert a pin and the tray comes out gracefully. But, you do need a pin. Bah.
There is also a 3.5mm headphone jack to the top and Apple provides a pair of ear buds. They are the ones which can be found on iPods with a slight difference. It has a mic-cum-switch. I was really amazed by the size of the microphone and was even more surprised when it turned out to be a switch as well. Apple; jaw drop inducer par excellence. And the voice quality (according to the people on the other end) was better than the in-built microphone. All the more reason for you to use it.
Performance and the Phone part of it..
Honey, this thing is fast!! There, I said it straight of. That is what happens when you plonk a 620MHz ARM processor and 128MB of RAM in a device which probably took lessons on “How to be Anorexic” from Angelina Jolie. But such specs are a necessity when you look at that beautiful interface. I just cant stop emphasizing how fast it really is. The time taken from clicking the picture and saving it takes all of 2 seconds. Booting up in less that 10 seconds. Instantaneous firing up of any application. I could go on and on, but you probably have got an idea.
Battery life is just too good. The claimed figures are 8hrs of talk time and around 20hrs of music. I havent tested it to such levels yet, but other reports tell me, that actually is the case. Which is all too good. The iPhone wont demand a run to the wall socket for its cuppa every day even under heavy usage.
Now, let me get on to the phone part of it. Its quite simple to make and recieve calls on the iPhone. The only problem is finding contacts in the address book, because it has no physical keyboard and neither do you have search. You can either flick through contacts or use the alphabet index on the right,which makes it a tad easier to get your contacts. One good thing is that, the faster you flick your finger, the more contacts it traverses. So you can jump down some 50 contacts in one flick.
Voice quality through the earpiece is nothing remarkable. But those at the other end reported a crisp voice.
iPod
The iPod part of the phone has been given a complete overhaul. And like Apple is advertising, it is the best iPod to date. The media integration is extremely good. Plug it into iTunes, and you’re done.
Fire up the Pod from the SpringBoard and just twist it to display in landscape mode. Now you can witness one more of Apple’s gems, CoverFlow. The effect is similar to shuffling CD’s in your own rack.
If you want to play a song from a certain album, just get it to the middle of the screen by flicking it and tap on the album cover once. The album cover will rotate smoothly to display the tracks in that album, tap it once to play your song (sigh, why cant we have such eye-candy on other phones). The audio quality is just as on the iPod’s and we wont get into the “Apple ear-buds, suck or not”, debate. Thats personal taste and for you to decide.
The jack provided is a standard 3.5mm jack, but its recessed. Thin pins will easily fit,but if your pin is on the fatter side, you will need an adapter to fit in your own ear/head-phones into it.
Camera and Internet
The camera is a 2.0MP unit. You can just click and watch the shutter animation. Thats about it. The image quality is pretty good, considering the fact that, there are no settings, whatsoever.
Surfing the net on the iPhone is a joy! Rendering is spot on, and the muti-touch gestures are applicable here too. Safari works for me and the speed on the Vodafone EDGe network is perfectly usable.
Time to Crib!!
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!! Apple usually are perfect at whatever little they do. Hence, I take immense pleasure in bashing them up. So why did Steve & Co. decide to give the MMS feature a skip?? And no 3G as well. Whats so “breakthrough” about not having 2 of the most basic communication options which everybody is offering. No video recording either. Also, why cant I pair to any other device to transfer at least photos, if not music.
Also, the camera should have had some more settings and a larger pixel rating. 3.2 is the de-facto standard these days. But, I think most of these problems will be solved by means of Firmware updates. Or maybe the next generation of iPhones. Which was precisely why I chose to buy the SE P1i and not the Apple iPhone.
Whats Hot
Seamless design
Multi-touch, accelerometer, proximity sensor
OS X on a mobile device!
Awesome interface
Amazing Media Player
Great Internet Experience
Whats Not
No MMS
No 3G
AT&T only (can be hacked, not much of an issue)
No custom camera settings
No native 3rd party application support (this too can be worked around)
Screen prone to finger prints (slap on a screen protector as soon as you buy it)
Whats in the box? Phone, USB cable, Wall socket, wiping cloth, USB docking stand, manual.
Price (8GB, all taxes inclusive)
India 30000/- onwards
Conclusion : The iPhone is an amazing device and it has certainly raised the bar in many aspects and the way we go about managing our business on a phone. One more thing it has successfully managed to do is that it has pushed every other manufacturer back to the drawing board. Expect better phones from everybody now. This is going to be good in the end for, you, the consumer. Till then, chew the Apple!
A note to all Indian users: Apple manufactures the iPhone at $174 (Rs. 7500). Airtel and Vodafone are selling it to us at $720 (31000/-). I leave it to you to decide whether its a good deal or not.
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