The one hour iPhone review

As is the way with Apple products, the veil of mystery and intrigue continues right up until launch day.

Just because the iPhone has been available in the States for over four months, it doesn't make its arrival to the UK any less of an event.

Getting hold of an iPhone prior to its 6.02pm launch tomorrow is well nigh impossible. Even touching one (under guard) is proving to be difficult.

I had initially expected to touch the hallowed wafer-thin device on Monday, courtesy of the Carphone Warehouse's PR company, but the very limited stock didn't arrive until yesterday afternoon.

So, at 11am, I got just under an hour to play with an iPhone, before it was packed back in its snug box, no doubt to be locked away.

Hence, this long review based on just 60 minutes of iPhone lust use.

Turning it on

The sturdy internal box is suitably, and typically, minimalist, and houses the iPhone and accessories.

The first thing that is likely to impress is just how thin and light it is. It just loves sitting in the palm of your hand, for one finger pecking at the icons, or resting on your fingertips, for two-thumb text entry.

The screen

Once turned on and unlocked, by swishing a finger across the virtual slider, you're greeted with an incredibly clear, crisp, bright, colourful display of the front page. It's truly gorgeous.

Tapping any icon causes the relevant application screen to zoom into view, very much like the Dashboard in Mac OS X works (which isn't surprising, given that a version of OS X is driving the iPhone)

The touch

The screen feels great to touch, even through the piece of protective self-adhesive plastic which initially protects it (I didn't remove it as it still felt like a showpiece model). It's highly responsive, and needs only a gentle tap.

The Home button

I found the home button — the only physical button on the front of the device — to require a little more pressure than I expected. I'm not sure whether I wasn't pressing it hard enough, or whether I needed to press and hold it momentarily. It could also have been due to the protective film across it. In any case, it did the job.

The volume button

The volume buttons are located along one of the long sides, and work as expected. If no music or video is playing, they adjust the ringer volume, otherwise they control the audio playback volume.

The internal speaker

Ring tones and audio will play through the built in speaker if no headphones are connected. The sound is decent enough for such a small device, though it distorted a little at higher volumes. Again, this could have been purely due to its protective sleeve (I really wish I could've taken that off).

Gesturing

At the heart of the iPhone's uniqueness is its multi-touch gesturing system.

Scrolling through lists of albums, phone numbers, emails, Cover Flow, and web pages, is effortless. I initially pushed my finger in the direction I wanted to go, rather than visualising the content of the screen as a piece of paper that can be dragged with the fingers. I think this would become intuitive very quickly.

Pinching and "reverse pinching" (what is that move called?) to zoom out and in wasn't immediately intuitive either, but it didn't take long. I wasn't so keen on the "pulling fingers apart" move to zoom in, until I realised that you can just keep one finger still on the screen, and move the other. Easy.

Changing orientation

The iPhone's built in accelerometer is supposed to ensure that changing the viewing orientation of the iPhone when viewing photos, movies, web pages, and album art, reorients the display.

I found that I was quite easily able to fool the iPhone into not changing direction, and it seems to require quite a deliberate movement for the iPhone to register the change in orientation. Sometimes I found it changed several seconds after I'd first moved the phone, by which time I'd flipped it back. I had a few minutes of fun when the iPhone seemed to be playing catchup with me.

Generally, though, the feature works well, and I'm sure, with time, you'd learn exactly what makes it respond, and what doesn't.

iPod functions

The iPod functionality works brilliantly. The Cover Flow feature is smooth and responsive, if selecting music that way, as are the hierarchical lists.

It's probably the best sounding iPod ever, too, though I didn't test it with the Apple-supplied earphones, which most people now agree are far from the best way of listening to your music.

Safari browser

The Safari browser renders web pages just gorgeously. Zoomed out, you get a perfect, if almost unreadable, version of the web page, perfect for seeing the overall layout. Using the pinching and scrolling gestures, it's easy to zoom in to a particular section to read.

For the few pages I visited, the lack of Flash and Java was no issue at all. It will really depend on how you expect to use the web when mobile as to whether you'll miss this on the iPhone. I'd suggest that the iPhone still provides one of, if not the, best mobile browsing experiences.

When you need to enter text, for example in username and password fields, Safari automatically zooms in on those fields, brings up the virtual keyboard, and lets you enter the text.

Password fields are still obscured, which means you have to pay close attention to which keys you're pressing. I had no problems, though.

I found some web pages, such as the BBC News page, loaded rather slowly, but unfortunately the office I tested out the iPhone in kept dropping the Wi-Fi network connection, which obviously slowed things down. Critics will say "ah yes, and the EDGE network is going to be very slow". However, I reckon that we'll not only see a lot more "made for iPhone" websites appearing, but also that the EDGE network could surprise. Don't shoot me down in flames for that statement, particularly if you live in a no-EDGE area.

YouTube

The YouTube application definitely had potential, and what little of one of the bookmarked videos I managed to play looked good, but possibly because of the slightly dodgy connection, it kept pausing and restarting, or playing bits of the audio without moving video.

I'm sure this was a problem with the connection and not the iPhone itself, though it would probably raises the issue of being able to download YouTube videos into the iPhone's memory for offline viewing.

SMS, Voice calls, Visual Voicemail

I was unable to test the phone capabilities, as the full O2 voice and text capability doesn't go live until tomorrow. So, I was unable to gauge just how good the call quality was, or whether the threaded SMS or visual voicemail services live up to their reputation.

Mail

Again, unfortunately, I didn't have time to set up my email account to check how this worked, but Rebecca, my PR contact for Carphone Warehouse, assured me that she had checked her email with absolutely no problem.

Susi had a few reservations about the lack of push email, and multiple accounts, which you can see in her video review.

Google Maps

Google Maps looked like it had a lot of promise. Though the iPhone's lack of GPS means that you have to manually enter your location, once done, it can offer you local maps, directions to another location, and business information.

My time was running out, and the application was running a little slow (mind you, it does that from my 6Mb home broadband connection from time to time so I didn't read too much into that). I sat looking at two red "pins" for about half a minute before the rest of the "from/to" map appeared.

iTunes Store

I couldn't access the iTunes Store, but I hope that this recently added function works well. I'm not convinced I'll be wanting to buy and download music over the air, but it's a great feature to have.

Stocks / Weather

Not exactly the most exciting applications, but they appear to work. The whole iPhone seemed to be oriented to Beijing time, for some reason, so I got to see how sunny it (apparently) is there at the moment.

Virtual Keyboard

So how about the "love it hate it" on screen keyboard?

I have to be honest, I had very few problems with it even at the start. It's slightly easier to hit the right keys in landscape mode, as the keys are larger, though it wasn't difficult in portrait mode either.

I found myself typing with two thumbs pretty quickly, and when resting on a flat surface, I used my two index fingers. Despite embarrassing myself slightly by misspelling "great" as "geeat" on a Twitter post I made with it (I didn't tap the correct suggestion the iPhone made) it was pretty quick to type. I'm not sure I'd want to type an article as long as this review on it, but for quick emails, tweets, SMS messages, and short blog posts, I think it's more than adequate.

I wonder if you can pair a bluetooth keyboard with it?

Conclusions

An hour isn't long to play with such an amazing phone. It's interesting that even some people who profess to hate Apple, or tried their best not to like the device, said that they couldn't help liking it.

There are other touchscreen phones on the market that are cheaper, do more (3G and GPS are notable omissions from the iPhone), and come on better contracts, but there's still something extra, almost intangible, about the iPhone.

It's not perfect, and anyone buying one in the next few months is sure to be annoyed as and when the rumoured 3G model comes along in 2008. Nevertheless, it seems to do a lot of things well. Coupled with O2's new almost-truly-completely-unlimited plan, it's surely a winner.

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