iPhone Reviews

Apple iPhone First Generation

Iphone is a stunning device that combines a phone, music player, camera and web browser all in one. The user interface does blow you away. This beauty still seems to be a flawed one. It does have a lot of boons and at the same time, a lot of banes too. The following review of the product will let you know them.

Design:

The Apple iPhone is the first one of the new generation of iPhones. IPhone has a very innovative design. The sleek Touch-Screen user interface is simply stunning. The 3.5″ display is brilliant and Apple has confidently designed this product with not a single button, completely trusting its phone’s touch sensitivity. Though this Apple iPhone 1st Generation is not the first phone that relies fully over the touch technology, this is the one that was launched with so much of attention and expectation. Anybody who sees you with the phone is sure of envying it. The phone comes with its dimensions as, (HxWxD) 115×16x12mm, but it would feel much smaller once you hold it, and you would feel it solid as it weighs 135 grams. The display is not plastic as you must be expecting, rather it is glass. But as with any other touch screen, this too attracts its share of smudges but you would not really care about this on seeing the beauty of its interface.

While the 3.5 inch display takes the complete advantage of the size of the phone, the 480×320 pixels resolution which produces sharp graphics and fluid movements in brilliant colours.

The left spine of the iPhone sports the volume rocker and a nifty ringer mute switch. The bottom has the jack for syncing dock and charger wire and you would also find the pair of speakers.

The interface and its working:

And here is a just how the touch screen of Apple iPhone 1G interface works. The icons appear huge on the touch-sensitive screen which again is enormous. The icons such as the camera, calendar and settings sit at the upper half of the display while the phone menu, the mail folder, safari browser and the ipod player sits in the bottom of the display. The phone icon on the screen takes you to the address book and by just tapping over the name you can make a call to that person. The photo icon makes your photo album glide over your iPhone. The fluid animation makes the task of navigation extremely simple and you can zip between them quickly. The instant responses that you get with your simple touches and the effects produced are a treat to your eyes. This might sound contrary to the reputation that the smart phones are having but sill this performance factor of the iPhone is certainly appreciable.

This Black Apple iPhone sports just one hardware menu that is present just below the display which takes you to the home screen, no matter which application you are using. This is a real handy one as you can avoid a numerous number of taps in case you are buried in some secondary menu. The iPhone does have a multi-function button on the top of its display which can be used to control the calls and phone answer. Pressing it once when there is an incoming call, silences the ringer and a double click sends the call to voice mail.

The multi-touch technology:

The phone is having a remarkable multi-touch technology. There are a lot of ways by which you can manipulate the content on the screen. The text in a message can be magnified by just pressing and holding over the selected area and without lifting your finger, you can magnify the other texts in the message. By pinching your fingers apart, you get the zoom-in effect and by just doing the opposite action, you can get the zoom-out effect. By swiping your finger left to right across a message, guess what happens? The delete option appears. Isn’t that so innovative? When you are accessing a webpage, you can navigate by just sliding your fingers and zoom-in with a double tap.

The sensors:

The motion sensor of this 8gb first generation iPhone automatically adjusts the display orientation when the phone is being flipped while using the music player or browsing. The iPhone also supports the proximity sensor which turns off the display when the phone is lifted towards your ears in order to have a conversation. But one worrying factor is the sleep time of the display which is just 30 seconds which must be unlocked using the on-screen slider. It would have been handy if there were any options to change it.

On-screen keypad and keyboard:

You may take some time to get used to the on-screen keypad. The on-screen keyboard too does a good job as tapping of messages was really quick. The software recognised the words ahead of time and was accurate most of the times. The keyboard is displayed only when the phone is held vertically. This makes you type comfortably in one hand and also cuts down your typing speed. Though it is possible to use your two hands, it might look too crowded and you might just feel uneasy after a while. The punctuations being live on the secondary keyboard are just annoying.

Tedious scrolls:

The process of scrolling was a little tedious too. Moving your finger in the up and down direction might just not help you with your scrolling. But, you do have another option, the alphabets are displayed on the right side of the screen and on choosing the starting alphabet of the album or contact that you require, you will be taken directly to that list.

The Phone Book of iPhone First Generation:

Each contact in the iPhone can hold up to eight phone numbers, email address, street addresses, occupation and department, nickname, birthday and notes. And that’s not all as you can assign them photo for caller ID and set any one of the available 25 polyphonic ring tones. Though you can not save callers to groups, you can always store your frequently accessed numbers in the favorites menu for easy access. The iPhone does lack the voice dialing facility. Only the mp3 tracks can be assigned to the ringtones in case they were the ones downloaded from iTunes.

The ipod in iPhone:

Coming to the ipod factor of the iPhone, if you have decided to get the iPhone, then its time for you to dispose the MP3 or MP4 or whatever player you own. IPhone acts as a great iPod with its 8GB built-in memory and a large screen. Listening and watching video songs is a great experience in the big screen as with any other Apple iPods. The iPhone also allows you to download songs from Apple’s fantasy iTunes. Unlike any other ipod of apple, the iPhone does not allow you to manually manage the transfer of audio and video content. With the 8GB memory, you can store up to 2000 songs. The integrated speaker is a real bonus. The sound quality of the iPhone is just similar to that of the ipod 5G. All these features in a phone are great! Are they not? Still do you have the idea of keeping your MP3 player in hand?

The call quality can be said to be as good but was not very dependable. The voices sound natural but the volume was too low most of the times. The speaker phone also suffered from volume issues. The automated calling system works remarkably at quiet rooms.

The iPhone has an integrated YouTube player which can be accessed straight from the main menu via a coloured button.

The web browser and Wi-Fi:

This Apple iPhone 1st generation 8GB Black supports the Safari web browser which is one of the best mobile web implementations that we have come across. It gives you completely satisfying experience to see the real web pages on the screen to this size. The browser just took 5 to 10 seconds to load pages and obviously the pages with heavy graphics consumed more time. The Google map feature is simply fabulous on the iPhone. The Google search is the default search engine of the phone though; yahoo search can also be used. This miracle device also has the support for the Built-in Wi-Fi. The support for Wi-Fi is the most welcome as this feature is absent in most of the smart phones.

Disappointing Camera:

The camera does disappoint you as it is of just 2 megapixels lacking autofocus and most disappointingly, even lacking the flash. This is simply unacceptable as the other top selling phones in the market such as the Nokia N95, Sony Ericsson K850i and Samsung G600, all come with 5 mega pixels along with auto focus and flash.

Connectivity:

The iPhone lets you down again when it comes to connectivity. The Apple iPhone is the only smart phone in the current market that lacks 3G. It is so puzzling that a phone that lays so much emphasis on the browsing and the music downloading facility lacks the 3G. Lack of 3G means, you can download only at 2G speeds. But yes, there is a way for you to attain higher data speeds. That is by being in an EDGE enabled area of the O2 or even being in a Wi-Fi hotspot. Whatever it may be, you would surely miss the 3G. Bluetooth2.0 is available with some serious limitations like no support for file sharing and stereo Bluetooth headsets. But this version of Bluetooth does deliver a faster transmission and longer range.

Messaging features:

Text messaging and mailing is possible with the iPhone. A text message thread is displayed as one long conversation which allows you to choose the message that you want to replay to. If you had switched to some other functionality in middle of your messaging, you can always return to the message that was left off. Surprisingly, iPhone does not support MMS. It is understandable that the photos can be sent via mail, but what if the user needs to share his photos with another mobile phone user? This does not sound to be user-friendly.

The iPhone’s mail menu has integrated support for the mailing services such as, yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Mac accounts and you can also set the phone to receive messages form the other IMAP4 and POP3 systems.
The visual voice mail feature of the iPhone works similar to that of a text message folder, where the caller name or number and time is being displayed. The message can be listened to instantly by pressing over it sans the need to call your voice mail initially.

The JPEG, word, excel and PDF documents can be viewed and read but you can not edit them.
Some of the other miscellaneous features that are available with the iPhone are the alarm clock, calculator, timer, stop watch, world clock and a notepad. The vibrate mode is available but it is too light to even feel.

Battery and OS:

With the huge screen a lot of gadgets to fiddle with, your battery gets eaten up soon. The claimed battery life is 8hours of talk time, 24hours of music and 7hours of video playback and 6hours on internet usage with a standby period of just over 10days. The battery in the iPhone is not user replaceable. This is bad as, Apple has estimated that the battery will last for 300 to 400 charges which means less than 2 years. Then again you will have to send it to Apple to replace them for you.

This iPhone runs in the Apple’s OS X operating system.

Verdict:

One of the most worrying facts of the iPhone is its cost. The iPhone is confined only to O2 with an expensive 18 month contract. You get trapped with O2 and the trap just does not end with the 18 months. Yes, as you realize, this makes iPhone the costliest mobile to have compared to the other mobiles on the mainstream market.

iPhone is such an amazing device that once you have used this device, you will find it really hard to use a normal phone again and would feel it like a cheap device. But from the above review, you may have understood that it is not a phone for everybody especially for those who are on a budget, rather you can opt for the other phones on the market that are equally good with the features just lacking the spectacular user interface that iPhone has. If you do not mind about the cost and love its looks, then iPhone is the one that you are looking for.

Apple iPhone First Generation - Technical Specifications, Features

iPhone	Apple iPhone first generation
Form factor	Candybar
Dimensions (H x W x D)	115 x 61 x 12mm
Display	3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen Multi-Touch display
Display resolution	480-by-320-pixel resolution at 163 ppi
Available Colours	Black
Audio formats supported	AAC, Protected AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV
Video formats supported	H.264 video,MPEG-4 video
Memory	8GB
Memory expansion	No
Headphone	Stereo earphones with built-in microphone
Camera	2 mega pixels
Connectivity	Bluetooth Wi-Fi
GSM frequencies	850, 900, 1800, 1900
3G	No
Voice recording	Yes
Video recording	No
FM radio	No
Headphone socket	3.5mm
Messaging	SMS, e-mail
Browser	Safari browser
Viewable document, image types	JPEG, word, excel and PDF
External button controls	Sleep/wake Ring/silent Volume up/down Home
Sensors	Accelerometer Proximity sensor Ambient light sensor
Battery	Lithium ion battery
Battery life	8hours of talk time, 24hours of music and 7hours of video playback and< 6hours on internet usage with a standby period of just over 10days.
Operating system	Apple OS X