Apple's iPhone: Revolutionary design with a few misses (San Diego Transcript column)

After more than a year of hype, created by Apple, analysts and the press, the iPhone finally goes on sale Friday at 6 p.m. It will cost $499 for the 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB version, plus a two-year service commitment from AT&T. Monthly rate plans range from $60 to $100 for data and voice.

While Apple has not provided review samples to most of the press other than to a few journalists with national exposure, I was able to try out an iPhone long enough to form some opinions, but not long enough to do a comprehensive review of all of its capabilities.

Here are my initial impressions:

Form

The product is sleek, beautifully finished and well constructed. It feels solid in the hand, although a little slippery. In short, it's gorgeous.

The front is all glass set into a chrome frame that runs around its perimeter. The back is matte aluminum and matte black plastic with a tiny speaker and microphone along the bottom edge and a 2GB camera at the top corner.

The high-gloss rectangular display, occupying about 70 percent of the front surface, is a bright, beautiful high-resolution LCD perfect for viewing photos, Web pages and videos. The iPhone has a connector on the bottom that's used for charging and to sync it to a PC or Mac using iTunes, much like an iPod. It will sync with the most popular Mac and PC address books and calendars.

User interface

With the touch of a button and a confirmation swipe of the finger at the bottom of the screen, the unit comes to life and displays a series of colorful square icons that represent its functions and applications, with the four major ones, phone, e-mail, Web and iPod at the bottom of the display.

The screen responds to finger touches and movements that are used to select, scroll, zoom, pan, and perform other actions, making it fun to use, especially with the animation and sound effects.
What's amazing is how quickly you can perform activities with simple taps and movements, and how well everything works together across the different applications.

This user interface has always been Apple's forte and it shows again here. Apple has created a new interface for mobile devices that's as significant as the mouse was for the PC.

Phone

The touchscreen phone keyboard is huge and easy to dial. Call quality was excellent, with clarity as good as other GSM phones I've used. There's easy access to lists of dialed and received calls. You can answer an incoming call while putting the current call on hold, and then conference the calls together, similar to the Treo. Voicemail can be viewed as a list on the screen, allowing you to play back messages in any order.

But retrieving a phone number from a large address book is cumbersome. There's no keyboard for searching by name, requiring scrolling through the list or through a letter directory. The best solution is to create a favorites list.

On-Line Experience

While the cellular world is moving to 3G data speeds of 1000 kbps and faster, the iPhone uses Edge, with speeds of less than 200 kbps. Fortunately the iPhone has built-in WiFi to use when you're near a hot spot.
Web browsing speed was similar to my BlackBerry 8800 on the AT&T Edge network, taking about seven to 10 seconds to open a new Web page. The Safari browser and large touch screen make it easy to navigate and find the part of the page of interest and then zoom in to read. No looking at a small screen trying to decipher a Web page that's all mixed up.

Despite the slow speed, the iPhone provides the best browsing experience of any smart phone. However, the slow connection speed limits using applications such as SlingBox, streaming radio, live TV, and over-the-air music downloading, services that are already available on other phones. Some skeptics speculate that Apple did this purposely to force all music and video sales to be through its iTunes store.

The Keyboard

A mechanical thumb keyboard to write e-mails and text messages has been the breakthrough that's made smart phones so useful. Yet Apple chose to use an on-screen keyboard, claiming it works better than other keyboards.

So how well did it do? I opened a blank e-mail and started typing with my two thumbs, as I do with my BlackBerry. But as hard as I tried and as carefully as I placed my thumbs over the keys, I kept mistyping.

Why? My smaller than average size thumb covers about three of the on-screen's keys. When my thumb contacted the screen it was hard to know what letter it would strike first, unlike using a mechanical keypad, which has protruding keys that you can feel.

My accuracy was only about 50 percent. Software corrected some of the misspellings, but none of the names of people, streets, and cities. The only way I was able to enter text accurately was by using a single finger, poking one key at a time, and using my fingernail rather than the fleshy part. (Apple says that after some practice you'll be able to type using your two thumbs, but count me as very skeptical.)

My conclusion: It's a one-finger keyboard and not for heavy e-mail users.

Power

Its rechargeable battery is likely to get you through a day of typical calls, music, videos and Web browsing. But should it run down from heavy use, you can't just pop in another battery; you'll need to recharge it. That's because the battery is inside the phone.

But batteries deteriorate with successive charges, needing to be replaced after about 400 cycles. That means if you're a heavy user your phone will need repairing in a year or two. This is a shortcoming compared with all other cell phones, done, I assume, to keep the iPhone as slim as possible.

Conclusion

The iPhone's ability to perform so many capabilities in a single device and still be intuitive to use is a remarkable achievement. But in doing so some compromises were made, making the iPhone geared less to the business user, and more to those wanting an entertainment device. That's because of the cumbersome keyboard, slow connection speeds and non-replaceable battery.

So should you buy the iPhone? In spite of my logical reasoning about its limitations, your emotional side may just find the iPhone too hard to resist, particularly if you're an early adopter and love to be at the center of attention. One thing is for certain; the iPhone will certainly attract a crowd!

Comments

[Brad]

I'm perfectly content with my Treo 680, and have considered it an "iPhone Killer" since I got it. It lacks Wi-Fi, the revolutionary UI, and fancier screen, but has many other positives.

It has a replaceable battery, so on my usual 4-day business trips I can just swap the battery on the 2nd day, and recharge them both when I get home. And when my batteries reach the end of their life cycle, I can buy new ones for about $25 each. If I choose, I can also buy double-capacity batteries and the thicker battery door to house them.

Since it has a card slot that accepts SDHC cards, I purchased 8GB for $70. I hear that 16GB SDHC cards are coming soon, with 32GB forecast as the SDHC limit. All of this storage makes it great for media files. The freeware TCPMP player handles every kind of media file I own.

I have access to 10's of thousands of Palm applications, many of them freeware. I can change the basic look and feel of the device just by adding a 3rd-party launcher (Initiate is my current fave). One of my most-used apps is CallRec, which enables me to record phone calls (or meetings) and voice memos with a single button click. Last night my 2-year-old called and left his first voicemail ever for daddy, all on his own. After hearing the sweet cute message, I clicked my recorder button, replayed the voicemail, and now have it saved forever.

The SMS client is fantastic, using threaded conversations.

The keyboard is perfect. My double-thumb speed is getting better all the time.

The camera is low-res, but it also shoots movies (the iPhone does not capture movies at all).

And, best of all, my device is completely unlocked so I can use it in the 82% of the world that uses GSM just by wandering into a local shop to purchase a SIM card.

[Marcos El Malo]

Nice balanced review! You didn't gush, but you didn't bash. This is the sort of review I want to read.

There's something that you seem to get, or almost get, when you say, "making the iPhone geared less to the business user, and more to those wanting an entertainment device". A possible restating of this is that, instead of being geared towards the gadget freak who wants a bullet point list of features, the iPhone is aimed at the ordinary person (or the ordinary person with $500 - $600 burning a hole in their pocket) who wants an easy to use device. From all reports, absolute novices are able to get up and running on the iPhone, using its features without delving into manuals.

This is one of the main points that really makes the iPhone revolutionary: the UI. Those who don't want an iPhone for whatever reason will still benefit from this revolution because it is going to force competition. Apple does not have a patent on ease of use, fortunately, and other handset makers are going to have to really start paying attention to this aspect. Apple makes it look easy, but I'm sure they sweated the details.

The other revolutionary aspect, in my opinion, is that smart phones are really mobile thin clients, with the internet being the server side. The iPhone exposes this model and puts the client into the hands of millions that otherwise wouldn't pick up a Treo. I think we're going to see a large section of the internet tailored to the iPhone and other mobile devices. I actually think Apple, in partnership with Google, has much more ambitious plans than that (Safari for Windows? Hmmmm). It's in this sense that the iPhone is the vanguard for a sort of revolution of how computing will be done in the future.

[Phil Baker]

That's a very good point and is much like Apple's positioning of their computers against PCs.