Katie's Ridiculously Long (overdue) iPhone Review

My apologies for the lateness of this review, but I figured to keep in line with my new years resolutions, better to post late than never. I actually started writing it a few months ago, and well, forgot about it. For those of you who don’t yet have an iPhone, it’s food for thought. Though you know you may want to wait now until after the January 15th Keynote at Macworld…you never know.

I wasn’t going to buy an iPhone. I had agonized back and fourth over the decision for months and when release day came, I watched all the coverage on the news and Internet wishing I could be a part of it all. But no, the iPhone wasn’t a practical decision for me. Finances were tight as I wasn’t working while in graduate school, I was getting ready to move to a new city and start a new job, and I was happy with my current provider and in the middle of a two-year contract. On top of it all, the phone was a first generation product that still lacked many features and cost $600. (You can read more about why I wasn’t going to buy an iPhone in my previous “Thoughts on iPhone" Blog Post.)

The first few weeks after the iPhone came out I avoided actually touching one. Sure, I had read all about them, watched the tutorials, and probably knew more about the iPhone than the average person who owned one. Corey had played with an iPhone that a co-worker owned and offered up this bit of advice. “If you really don’t want to buy one, don’t touch one. If you touch it, you will buy it.” He was right. I touched it…and I bought it…and now I can’t imagine my life without it.

The iPhone is a hard product to review because it does so many different things. I’m going to try to break this review down into the different categories of iPhone functions in hopes of making it a little easier to digest. Please feel free to post any comments or questions and I’ll do my best to answer them. You can also email us at themaccore@gmail.com or call our audio hotline at 206.203.2673 with your own thoughts on the iPhone.

The Phone
I’ve always had fairly generic cell phones and considered myself to be an average cell phone user. All I wanted was a phone that would make and receive phone calls effectively. I’d pay a little extra for features like Bluetooth and synced my contacts and calendar to my MacBook using iSync, but that was about it. I never used text messaging, never used the built-in camera, and didn’t know how to forward calls, setup three-way calling, and never used the web browser or data capabilities. My last and favorite phone before the iPhone was the Motorola e815 but I didn’t even use a fraction of its features.

One of the biggest benefits about the iPhone is that all of the advanced features such as conference calls or putting a person on hold or mute are very conveniently located on the phone’s display and make these features easy to use. I’ve never used the text messaging features on my previous phones before but having the 100 SMS messages included in the basic iPhone plan and the SMS icon right on the home screen makes it easy and convenient. I’ve probably sent a dozen text messages a month and find the feature to come in handy when you need to send someone a quick message but don’t want to disturb them with a telephone call. Text messages are great little things. A little more important and immediate than an email, but not quite so urgent as to require a phone call. A happy medium.

Visual voicemail is a feature that at first I thought was a little gimmicky, but now I’m loving it. There are days when I have a half dozen voicemail messages waiting for me at any given time and I can quickly at a glance see who has left a message and prioritize the order in which I want to listen to the messages, not just the order in which the person called. Using voicemail is much easier than before, simply tap on the icon, and tap on the message you want to play. Before you had to dial a number, hit the pound key, dial a password, then press the corresponding keys based on the options you wanted to play the message.

I’m hesitant to review the coverage offered by AT&T because obviously that’s something that’s going to vary by person-to-person and location-to-location. So I’ll try to keep my comments about the service and service plans fairly general. The activation process was flawless, this was without a doubt the easiest and painless activation I’ve ever had with a cell phone. I didn’t have to go into an AT&T store, didn’t have to fill out piles of paperwork for a credit check, didn’t have to deal with customer service people, I simply activated it when I was ready from my own home and on my computer with iTunes. Porting my number over from Verizon was very easy, although the actual port took about 3 days to complete due to I’m told to system maintenance that was occurring the weekend I bought the iPhone. After setting up my iPhone via iTunes, within a minute my phone was activated and ready to make calls. This is the way all cell phone activations should be.

I figure I’m actually saving money using the iPhone compared to what I would be spending with a similar plan with my old provider. I choose the low-end iPhone plan with 450 minutes and unlimited data for $59 a month. In my case, because AT&T offers the option to start your night and weekend minutes at 7 instead of 9 for only a few dollars more a month, I was actually to drop my minute plan and save $20 which makes up for the price of the data plan. So I’m getting much more options with unlimited data for just a few bucks more than I was paying with my previous provider. I personally have found the AT&T coverage area to be very good, although I do live in a larger metropolitan area. In the several months I’ve had my phone, I’ve never dropped a call, and was even able to carry a signal while driving trough fairly rural areas as I drove 2 hours to my parents house. My only complaint with AT&T would be that I am experiencing the famous “GSM buzz” which I hear is common with GSM-based phones. Fequently the iPhone will create interference with other speakers and I’ll have to turn the iPhone off or turn it to Airplane Mode when I podcast if the iPhone is on my desk or we’ll get some feedback. This is my first experience with a GSM phone and from what I’ve heard it’s fairly common and not an iPhone specific problem.

Without a doubt the iPhone is the simplest cell phone I’ve ever used. It’s easy and intuitive to navigate through the various call features. However there are a few little problems I wish would be corrected. First, the volume of the ringtones seems a little low. More than a few times I’ve missed a call just because I’ve been in the other room or was watching TV and didn’t hear the phone ring. Following up on this, my Motorola phones had a feature where if you missed a call or had a voicemail, it would beep every few minutes to alert you to the missed call until you dismissed message. While some people have told me they find this feature annoying, I loved it. If you miss a call on the iPhone, you may never know until you pick up the phone and start using it. Because the screen goes to sleep after a few minutes of activity, there’s no visual alert to tell you that there was a missed call. I find myself having to make a point to check the iPhone to see if there was a missed call regularly. An audible alert would prevent this.

I’m also disappointed that the iPhone currently doesn’t have any type of voice dialing. Especially for a phone that has no tactile feedback, voice dialing would be an especially helpful feature while in the car. I’m curious as to why this feature was left out when today even the most basic cell phones seem to have it. Hopefully some enhancements will come through software updates.

iPod
Steve Jobs touted the iPhone as the best iPod Apple has ever made. I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with Steve on that point. First a caveat, I use my iPod only for music, I don’t use it as a video player. I would imagine that the iPhone makes a great video iPod, but that’s not how I use it for a day-to-day basis and as a result this review will be skewed towards my perspectives on the iPhone as a music player.

My biggest complaint about the iPhone as an iPod is that although it has the standard 30-pin dock connector, it doesn’t necessarily work with all iPod dock accessories. My biggest beef with the iPhone is that it does not work with my dock equipped car stereo. I paid over $200 less than a year ago to have a specialty stereo installed in my car so I could listen to my iPod through direct dock access rather than using a cassette adapter or FM transmitter. As soon as I plug the iPhone into the stereo the iPhone doesn’t recognize the device and the car stereo simply blinks “check connection.” Because I travel frequently for work and spend a fair amount of time in the car this makes the iPhone practically useless to me as a music player. Thankfully I still have my 5th Generation iPod around, but at the time I bought the iPhone I was planning to sell the iPod to help offset the cost of the device. That hasn’t been able to happen, and as a result I still have to carry around an iPhone and an iPod. Car connectivity is a big deal for me, and had I known the iPhone wouldn’t work with my car setup, I probably would have thought twice about buying it. I’m hopeful that future software updates to the iPhone will add more device compatibility or that as the iPhone become more popular, third party manufacturers will update their devices to be compatible. So far neither has happened yet.

Another gripe I have about the iPhone as an iPod is the control mechanism. Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is a very pretty iPod, so pretty in fact Apple came out with the iPod Touch which has a near identical interface. However, I personally haven’t found the iPod to be a particularly functional iPod because of the lack of tactile controls. Any time you want to change songs or shuffle through playlists you have to actually pull the iPhone out, touch the home button, unlock the screen, navigate to the iPod screen and do what you want to do. You can’t just hit a button to skip to the next song. Now with the new firmware update, you can customize your Home button to act as a shortcut to iPod controls, and this has helped quite a bit, but it’s still not the greatest interface.

My last complaint is about the storage space on the iPhone. I have a 60GB iPod that I have practically full with music. Once you leave room or the iPhone software you’re left with about 7GB left. You want to leave some room free obviously for email and web cache so let’s say that only leaves about 6.5GB left for actual content. If you’re adding videos to the iPhone, then it doesn’t take much before your iPhone is full I’ve tried creating specialized smart playlists for the iPhone and no matter what I do, I’m still finding that that one song I was in a mood to hear isn’t synced over. This I why I’ve never bought an iPod Nano, I want access to at least most of my music all of the time. For me, the iPhone would have to be at least 16GB, and preferably 32GB before I could use it s my primary music player. Though I realize that flash memory is getting bigger and cheaper every day, so I’m sure we’ll see larger capacity iPhones soon, perhaps even in a few weeks at Macworld.

So, as you can see, I’m not really thrilled with the iPhone as an iPod, though obviously quite a few people are because there seems to be overwhelming interest in the iPod Touch, an iPod that uses the same interface as the iPhone. As I said, I’m sure the iPhone makes an excellent portable video player, but that’s just not how I use it. However I do like the idea of having a selection of my music on my phone. This past weekend I was getting my car serviced and spent a few hours in a waiting room. Having an iPod in my phone meant I only had to carry on extra device, and I really like the idea of carrying around fewer devices. Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is not a bad music player. In fact, I’d bet the iPhone has the best interface of all the music players on the market other than the iPod. On top of that the iPhone isn’t a bad iPod, it’s just not my favorite of all the iPods. Given that, there’s still a lot about the iPhone I do like, so perhaps it’s best to move on.

PDA
I thought about putting this section inside the iPod section, but it didn’t quite seem to fit. While it’s true that all of the iPods except the shuffle do have the ability to sync with iCal and Address Book, the iPhone is starting to cross more into the realm of a PDA than any previous iPod. I’m not a “power PDA” user, I basically just want to be able to look up contact information quickly and be able to see where I’m supposed to be and add appointments. The iPhone lets me do all this, and I’m happy. Though there’s certainly room to grow and I do think we’ll see growth in the PDA features of the iPhone with subsequent software upgrades, especially once Leopard starts shipping as it will have many enhancements to these features.

First up, the calendar. It looks like iCal, but it doesn’t have all the functionality of iCal, and I personally have never thought that iCal was a full-featured calendar program. There are no pretty colors on the iPhone like there is in iCal. This means you can’t at a glance look and see what types of activities you’re doing. In Cal, I use blue to indicate personal appointments; orange to indicated things for school, and purple is for work-related appointments. It’s a minor thing, but it’s an enhancement that would make the calendar more functional. There’s also no “week view” in the calendar application, which is the view I most often use in iCal.

The most glaring deficiency of the iPhone as a PDA is the lack of “To Dos.” I’m a big list person and if it’s not on my “to do” list, generally it’s not on my radar screen. I simply don’t understand how this functionally was left out of the iPhone, especially considering there is already basic to do functionality in iCal. For the time being, I’m using the notes function for my To Do lists, but the problem with that is that the notes don’t sync back to your Mac, which is also a problem. I thought for sure this functionality would be added when Mac OS 10.5 Leopard shipped to add support for notes and to dos in the new Mail.app. But alas, nothing yet. Again, there are rumblings of a major software update on the way so I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.

Internet Communications Device
Saving the best for last, the internet and communication features are what sold me on the iPhone and these are the life-changing features I use more than anything else on the device. Having the Internet in your pocket is a wonderful thing. I keep up with my personal email, check the latest RSS feeds, and even keep up to day on what’s happening with my Twitter friends. After using the iPhone, I can’t imagine ever going back to another cell phone that doesn’t have email and internet compatibles.

Most, but not all of the time, the Safari web browser on the iPhone is great. If nothing else, it has the most ingenious use interface of any device I’ve ever seen. I’m simply in awe of the multi-touch technology and can’t wait to see how it makes its way into future versions of the iPhone and other Apple products down the line. And although there are limitations to Safari on the iPhone, it is without a doubt the best mobile browser currently available, lightyears ahead of the competition. One major complaint is the lack of Flash support on the iPhone. And I admit this has been a problem on more than one occasion. Hopefully Apple and Adobe will get together and make this work. However, I have heard complaints of Flash being a major battery hog and the iPhone’s battery life with heavy web use is already not as high as I would like it to be. Internet use is the biggest drain on the iPhone’s battery and when your cell phone battery does, especially a battery that’s not user replaceable, that’s a problem. More on that later though…

EDGE network is okay for most things although I live in an area with 3G coverage and the extra speed would be nice. For receiving basic text emails and doing quick checks of my RSS feeds EDGE is fine. Loading a webpage that is graphic intense is more of a problem and I crave to be on a wireless network. Though one thing I’ve learned, wireless networks are not as pervasive as you may need them to be. So for most of what I do daily with my iPhone, EDGE is fine. Steve Jobs has said a 3G iPhone is coming, but again the main issue is battery life. As I mentioned above, battery life is one thing that can be problematic on the iPhone to begin with, so at this point, I’m willing to sacrifice speed if it means I can use my iPhone all day without having to find a wall outlet to charge it up.

Mail is probably my most used application on the iPhone, and it’s pretty good. This is the one feature that the iPhone has made me realize I can no longer live without. I do have a few gripes and the biggest is lack of Exchange support. We use an exchange server at work and not being able to get access to my exchange email is going to be a bigger deal as time goes on. My IT department really has our email locked down and doesn’t seem all that friendly towards the idea of supporting the iPhone. I’m going to give Apple a few more months to come up with a software update to add Exchange this support, and the rumor sites say this is coming. But if something doesn’t give soon I’m going to have to start looking at other email options. I can’t even access our exchange mail through the web interface on the iPhone as a backup and I’m not quite sure why that is. But it’s certainly annoying and is a problem that I am going to need to come to some kind of resolution with as time goes on.

Another complaint is that the Mail on the iPhone doesn’t do that great of a job of syncing up with your Mail.app. My solution has been to use IMAP and a series of rules and custom mailboxes but it’s been a bit of a pain to work around. If you have POP email access only, I can see where it would be an even bigger problem. I personally use Gmail as a go-between for many of my mail accounts and now that Gmail has IMAP access that’s been a big help. One final minor complaint is that all the mailboxes are treated separately, meaning I can’t have one combined inbox to see mail from multiple accounts.

Using the iPhone
I’ve really gotten the hang of typing on the iPhone keyboard, it’s by no means perfect, but I picked it up a lot faster than I thought I would and actually have become pretty good at it. I’m no where near as fast on the iPhone as I am on a standard keyboard, but it’s not horrible. One thing is for sure, I try to keep my emails on the iPhone short and sweet. Which I’m told may not be a bad thing.
One question that has popped up recently is using the iPhone as a replacement for a computer. Is the iPhone really the first ultra portable Mac? It’s a great start, and I’m using my iPhone for a lot of things I use to have to pull my laptop out for, but it’s by no means a computer replacement. For example, I’ll usually take a weekend trip to my parents house and of course I don’t travel without my MacBook. I’m finding more and more on those trips that I’m using my MacBook less and my iPhone more, but it’s not a replacement. I still can’t imagine taking a weekend trip and not touting along my MacBook. Perhaps in the future, if the iPhone coupled some sort of “finder” interface for the ability to access and save documents and a simplified version of Pages it would be a start. Also, maybe a random idea, but with that new ultra-portable Apple wireless keyboard, and the fact that the iPhone has built in Bluetooth, is it crazy to ask that Apple let me pair those devises together and use the keyboard with my iPhone when I’m traveling? A few more tweaks and I could see the weekend where I could leave my MacBook at home.

As I’ve mentioned before, the battery life on the iPhone is good, but not great. On a day where I use my iPhone heavily for web browsing I find that I occasionally have a battery die on me in the evenings. And no matter what, I need to charge my iPhone every night or I’ll have a problem the next day. With all the iPhone does, I’m not so sure Apple really could have squeezed any more battery life out of the device and I think this is why we’ve seen some features such as Flash and 3G left behind. However one thing I think is inexcusable on Apple’s part is not allowing the iPhone battery to be user replaceable. Have you ever heard of another cell phone where the user can’t pop in and out the battery? I’d like the option to be able to pop in a spare battery if I know that I have a long day of use ahead of me and may not be able to find a convenient place to charge my iPhone. Apple claims that the iPhone’s battery will a last for years, but I’m not so sure I buy that. I’ve found that my iPod batteries tend to need replacing around the 18-month to two year mark. In my mind, this makes AppleCare for the iPhone an absolute must. If nothing else, you can be guaranteed that you will at least use it for a battery replacement sometime down the line.

Lastly, let’s talk price. Now I don’t want to get into the whole $200 price drop drama and how early adopters got stuck with a $100 Apple Store credit. I personally lucked out in all that and bought my iPhone at the $599 price point but was within a month and able to get my price adjusted to $399. But I think the $399 price point is much more realistic. I was shocked when I heard about the original $599 price tag to the iPhone and that kept me from buying an iPhone for a long time. Had the price started at $399 I wouldn’t have thought twice. Still, especially when you consider the 2-year contract with AT&T I still think the price may be a little high. I think $299 would be a VERY sweet spot for Apple an dthey could move quite a bit more product. Though at least it would be nice to see a $399 16GB version and a $299 8GB version in the future. If there was any way to get the iPhone down to $199, man they would fly off the shelf. The $399 price point is still an “ouch” and especially without the ability to buy accident protection for the iPhone from AT&T I think if something happens to your iPhone it’s going to really hurt to have to replace it. But as we all know, over time with technology, prices do come down, so I’m sure the same will be true for the iPhone.

That about sums it all up. Again, I love my iPhone and even though there are quite a few items on my “wish list” if my iPhone were to die tomorrow, I’d be in line waiting for the Apple store to open the next morning to replace it. Regardless of what else you can say about the iPhone, I truly believe that it’s a game changer for the cell phone industry. It will drive innovation in the cell phone industry, and I can’t wait to see what the second and third generations of the iPhone will look like a few years from now.