Features
The iPhone's phone book is limited only by the phone's available memory. Each contact holds eight phone numbers, email, Web and street addresses, a job title and department, a nickname, a birthday and notes. You can't save callers to groups, but you can store your preferred friends to a favourites menu for easy access. You can assign contacts a photo for caller ID and assign them one of 25 polyphonic ringtones. We should note, however, that you can't use MP3 files as ring tones.
Other basic features include an alarm clock, a calculator and a notepad. That's a somewhat skimpy selection of features, given that the most basic phones offer many more organisation-oriented applications such as a world clock, a stopwatch and a timer. There's a vibrate mode, but it's a tad light.
The calendar offers day and month views, and you can use the calendar as an event reminder or to-do list as well. The interface is clean and simple, though inputting new appointments involves a lot of tapping. There's no week view, however.
Bluetooth and wireless
The iPhone offers a full range of wireless functionality with support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The Wi-Fi compatibility is especially welcome, and a feature that's absent on far too many smart phones. When you're browsing the Web, the iPhone automatically searches for the nearest Internet hotspot. Bluetooth 2.0 is also on board, which delivers faster transmission and a longer range than Bluetooth 1.2. You also get a range of profiles including file transfer, but an A2DP stereo-Bluetooth profile is not among them -- another item that's not necessary but would be nice to have.
Though Apple CEO Steve Jobs has explained the iPhone's lack of 3G support by saying the chipsets take up too much room and they drain too much battery, we'd like the option anyway. Yes, the Wi-Fi network is great when you can get it, but AT&T's EDGE network just doesn't cut it for all other surfing. EDGE Web browsing is so slow it almost ruins the pretty Web interface.
Messaging and email
For your messaging needs, the iPhone offers text messaging and email. As on many smart phones, a text-message thread is displayed as one long conversation -- a useful arrangement that allows you to pick which messages you'd like to answer. If you use another function while messaging, you can return to pick up that message where you left off. We just don't understand, however, why Apple doesn't include multimedia messaging (MMS). Sure, you can use email to send photos, but without MMS you can't send photos to other phones -- pretty much the entire point of a camera phone.
The iPhone's email menu includes integrated support for Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Mac accounts. You can set up the phone to receive messages from other IMAP4 and POP3 systems. You can read -- but not edit -- PDF, JPEG, Word and Excel documents. Worse: you can't cut and paste text when composing messages.
iPhone's iPod
Sandwiched between all the iPhone's features lives Apple's most amazing iPod yet. The display, interface, video quality, audio quality -- all of it is meticulously refined and beautiful. Unfortunately, it's trapped within a device that will cost you more than US$1,000 (AU$1175) a year just to own. CNET recently reviewed a Rolls Royce that had a top-notch umbrella hidden inside its passenger door. Buying the iPhone for its iPod feature is much like buying the Rolls Royce for its umbrella. Regardless, the iPhone is an exciting glimpse into what Apple hopefully has planned for its sixth-generation iPod.
On paper, the iPhone's iPod doesn't offer any features not already on a 5G iPod: pocasts, videos, music and playlists are all here, and content management with iTunes is identical. The difference rests entirely in the iPhone's interface. We've used other MP3 players that use touch interfaces, such as the Archos 704, iRiver Clix and Cowon iAudio D2, but the iPhone's unique integration of multi-touch technology and graphical user interface put it in a category all of its own.
From an iPod perspective, Apple's biggest triumph with the iPhone is the fact that it has returned album artwork back into the music experience in a way that goes beyond a token thumbnail graphic. Physically flipping through your music in the iPhone's CoverFlow mode really brings back the visceral feel of digging through a CD or record collection. It's a difficult feeling to quantify, but music lovers will appreciate how well the iPhone reconnects their digital music to a form that is both visually and physically more vivid. Even iTunes users who may already be jaded about using the CoverFlow mode on their computer will be surprised at how the experience is changed by using the iPhone's intuitive touchscreen.
Truth be told, there is one feature that is new to the iPhone's iPod -- the integrated speaker. While the iPhone's speaker sounds thin and is prone to distortion, it works in a pinch for sharing a song with a friend. Apple was also smart enough to manage its speaker volume independent of the headphone volume, so if you're listening to the speaker full-blast and then decide to plug in your headphones, you won't be deafened.
The bad news is that the iPhone's iPod leaves out the ability to manually manage the transfer of music and video content. Unlike any previous iPod, the iPhone does not allow an option for manually dragging and dropping content from an iTunes library directly to the iPhone device icon. Instead, the iPhone strictly uses defined library syncing options for collecting and syncing content from your iTunes library to the device. This should work out fine for most people, but for a device with limited memory the inability to manually manage content seems like a misstep. Our 8GB iPhone was already a quarter full after only a few hours of testing, giving us the impression that users will need to be vigilant at grooming their iPhone library.
The iPhone's music sound quality seems right in line with our experience using the 5G iPod. All the same equaliser presets are available, only now they are found on the iPhone's main Settings tab. The included iPhone earbuds did a passable job for casual listening in a quiet environment. Unfortunately, the iPhone's recessed headphone jack prevented us from using many of the test headphones we're familiar with. We were just barely able to squeeze the plug of our Etymotic ER6i earphones into the jack to do the comparison.
Watching video on the iPhone is not quite as luxurious as a Creative Zen Vision: W or Archos 504, but its wide screen and bright contrast beat the 5G iPod by a mile. Like previous iPods, video playback is automatically bookmarked so that playback resumes where you left off.
Safari browser
The Safari browser really sets the iPhone apart from the rest of the mobile phone crowd. Rather than trudging through stripped-down WAP pages with limited text and graphics, the browser displays Web pages in their true form. It's a completely and surprisingly satisfying experience to see real Web pages on a screen of this size.
To pan around a page, just swipe your finger across the display, and the page moves accordingly. Tap your finger on a link to open a new page and double-tap your finger to zoom in and zoom back out. You can use the arrows on the bottom of the display to move back and forth, while a multi-function button at the bottom of the display lets you open new pages and flick among them.
Google search is the iPhone's default search tool, but you can use Yahoo search as well. When searching for information or typing URLs, you use the on-screen keyboard. It's just like typing an email, except that the space bar is replaced with Web-appropriate language like '.com' and a slash. That's a nice touch.
Thanks to the accelerometer, you can tip the phone on its side for a more comfortable landscape view. It doesn't matter which direction you rotate the phone, as it will work either way. Most Web pages looked great on the screen, but really busy pages like CNN.com can be too crowded. And because you can zoom in only a set amount, some text can still be too small to read clearly. You can store bookmarks and sync your favourite pages from your PC, but it only works for Internet Explorer and not Firefox.
YouTube
You can activate the iPhone's integrated YouTube player straight from the main menu via a coloured icon. Videos are organised using many of the same criteria on the YouTube site, including Featured clips, Most Viewed, Top rated and Most Recent. You can read the information attached to a video, such as the date posted and the poster's name, but you can't read comments. It doesn't appear, however, that the YouTube connection updates in real time. We uploaded a video of our own, and it didn't show up until a few hours later.
Widgets
The iPhone doesn't have integrated GPS, but it does have a widget for accessing Google Maps. You can get directions by telling the iPhone where you are and where you want to go, but you can't get real-time directions with turns or traffic updates. The map interacts well with the calling functions as you find a point of interest and ring it in just a few taps. We also like that you can get the Google satellite view.
Additional widgets point to share-price information and weather reports. You can program your own tickers and receive information like a share gain or loss and see a chart of a share price over a time period. The weather function gives you a six-day forecast of your city.
Visual voice mail
One of the most intriguing features on the iPhone is the much-touted visual voice mail. iPhone's voice mail works much like a text-message folder in that it displays the caller's name or phone number and the time. What's even more fantastic, however, is that you can listen to the message instantly by pressing the individual message -- you don't have to call your voice mail first.
Camera
The iPhone's 2-megapixel camera offers a tasty interface with a graphic that resembles a camera shutter. You're offered no photo-editing options, which we didn't expect. That means you can't change the resolution, choose a colour or quality setting, or select a night mode. There's no flash either, and with no self-portrait mirror, those vanity shots are going to be tricky.
The camera performed well in our tests, however. Photo quality was excellent with rich, bright colours and distinct object outlines. White looked slightly too soft, but we approve overall. On the downside, you can't shoot your own video, which is disappointing on a phone of this price.
As we said earlier, the photo menu is attractive and easy to use, particularly due to the pinching motion. You can also flip between photos by swiping your finger across the display. When selecting a photo, you're given the option of assigning it to a contact, using it as wallpaper or emailing it to a friend.
Call quality
We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) Apple iPhone in San Francisco using AT&T service. Call quality was good for the most part, but it wasn't dependable. Though voices sounded natural, the volume was often too low, and the microphone has a sensitive sweet spot. When we moved the phone away from our ears ever so slightly, the volume diminished noticeably and we had to move the phone back to just the right place to hear clearly. The volume wasn't so bad that we weren't able to hear a friend who was in a crowded bar, but it could be better. The speakerphone was also too quiet, though conversations weren't too muffled.
CNET.com users have also reported volume problems, and a few people we called said they heard a slight background hiss. We didn't hear the hiss on our end, but more than one of our friends said they noticed it. Automated calling systems were able to understand us, but only if we were in a quiet room.
Browser speed
We tested the Safari browser using the iPhone's Wi-Fi over CNET's internal network. Web pages loaded in about five seconds, though sites with heavy graphics took longer. It was a smooth experience overall, though not quite as zippy as we had hoped. That could be due to CNET's network, so we're going to test more hotspots over the next few days. When not using Wi-Fi, you're stuck with AT&T's EDGE network, which is just too slow to render the lovely Safari interface enjoyable. With speeds in the 50-90Kbps range, it reminded us of a dial-up browser. We'll try it again in more places as well.
Activation was easy using iTunes 7.3. Our computer recognised the iPhone right away and the activation system started automatically. After a few prompts, it asked us if we wanted to automatically sync contacts from Yahoo and Windows mail and contacts from Outlook. It also asked us to if we wanted to sync Internet bookmarks, but as we said earlier it won't import Firefox bookmarks. The integration with AT&T's account service is also seamless. We were able to select a plan and indicate whether we were a current AT&T customer. It even asked us if we wanted to port a current phone number. In all, it's much better experience than dealing with AT&T.
Battery life
The Apple iPhone has a rated battery lifeSAR rating of 0.974 watts per kilogram. We'll update with our full battery life tests as soon as possible.
Editor's note: CNET Labs is still conducting battery and talk time tests for the iPhone. We'll update the review as soon as the tests are completed.
6%
2%
iphone is very good