`
` T
`
`IPHONES iphone
`he iPhone: Complete review
`
`Review
`
`Product Specs
`
`Compare
`
`PRODUCTS REVIEWED
`
`Apple iPhone 4GB
`
`Apple iPhone 8GB
`
`By Jason Snell, MacworldJul 3, 2007 12:00 AM
`
`3
`
`Tweet
`
`submit
`
`Apple’s iPhone is a product that’s been years in the making. Apple’s designers have been working on it for
`years, and the Web has been buzzing about Apple’s entry into the phone market for just as long—or
`maybe even longer. But now, after six months of intense speculation since its introduction at Macworld
`Expo, the iPhone has arrived. Although the iPhone is not without a few quirks, it makes good on the hype
`that surrounded it.
`
`Hefting the hardware
`Steve Jobs proudly described the iPod as a beautiful piece of hardware that had amazing software inside
`it. And with the iPhone, Apple’s hardware designers have once again wrapped the output of the company’s
`in-house developers into a remarkable piece of hardware. Pictures of the iPhone don’t do it justice: it’s
`smaller than it looks. Roughly the width (2.4 inches) and height (4.5 inches) of a full-size iPod, depth is the
`dimension that makes the iPhone feel tiny: it’s shockingly thin, measuring less than half an inch.
`
`However, the iPhone doesn’t feel fragile. It’s got enough weight (4.8 ounces) to it to feel substantial when
`it’s in the palm of your hand. And as our colleagues at PC World have shown , the iPhone appears to be
`
`

`

`built to last, with a screen that proved quite resistant to scratches and drops. The iPhone’s back side is a
`textured silver, rather than the polished stainless steel of the full-sized iPod models, so my guess is that
`both the front and back of the iPhone will be more resistant to scratches than either the full-sized iPod or
`the original iPod nano.
`
`This is not to say that the iPhone is impervious to being marked up. Perhaps we were unwise to order
`pizza at Macworld on the day of the iPhone’s arrival, but the grease from that pizza helped make a point:
`the iPhone’s screen collects fingerprints. The good news is, the screen’s so bright that in most situations
`you don’t notice the fingerprints. But it’s enough of an issue that Apple includes a small black chamois cloth
`in the iPhone box, and the image-conscious iPhone owner will want to give their screen a good wipe-down
`often.
`
`The dominant physical feature of the iPhone is its black glass face, punctuated by a single physical button
`on the bottom and a speaker slit near the top for listening to phone calls. But the Home button isn’t the only
`physical button to be found anywhere on the iPhone; on its side are a pair of volume buttons, which
`(depending on context) will let you raise or lower the volume of the phone’s ringer, music or video
`playback, or conference-call speakerphone. Placed right above these two buttons is a switch that slides
`back and forth; in one position the iPhone will emit sound from its external speaker, while in the other it will
`only vibrate to warn you that something’s going on.
`
`Using a switch instead of a toggle button was an excellent choice, since you can feel the switch’s position
`even in a darkened movie theater. However, the volume buttons are located a bit too close to the switch,
`and on several occasions I found myself pushing the switch (which won’t budge) in a vain attempt to boost
`the iPhone’s volume.
`
`The iPhone’s top has a physical button, too. It serves as a wake/sleep toggle button: press it and the
`iPhone goes to sleep and locks instantaneously. (This feature is aimed at preventing you from accidentally
`pushing an on-screen button; you can still receive incoming calls when the phone’s in this state.) Press
`that same button and hold for a few seconds, and the iPhone will shut down completely.
`
`Opposite the wake/sleep toggle on the iPhone’s top edge is a recessed headphone jack. It’s a standard
`3.5-millimeter jack—the very same sort used on the iPod—but because it’s recessed many third-party
`headphones won’t fit, especially if they’ve got a large plug or one that turns at a 90-degree angle. It’s too
`bad that a clunky add-on accessory will be necessary for aficionados of high-quality headphones to use
`the iPod features of the iPhone. (Although if the iPhone is a success, headphone manufacturers will almost
`certainly build their plugs to ensure iPhone compatibility.)
`
`The iPhone comes with a set of stereo earbuds that sound pretty good, exponentially better than the
`earbuds that shipped with the original iPod. These earbuds also include an inline microphone that’s also a
`
`

`

`clicker: click once to pause or play your music, or click twice to advance to the next track. Although I’m
`sure that third-party headphone makers will create numerous excellent alternatives, the good news is that
`the iPhone’s in-the-box earbuds are very good.
`
`On the iPhone’s back face is the tiny lens of its compact, two-megapixel camera. It doesn’t zoom and
`doesn’t work well in low light, but with still subjects in well-lit areas it produces nice results. It’s definitely
`more appropriate for fun shots when no other camera is around than as a replacement for your digital
`camera, even if your camera is five years old. (The camera also can’t record video, at least not with the
`current version of the iPhone’s software.)
`
`The iPhone’s inside may not be as beautiful as the outside, but it’s full featured. Each iPhone contains
`either 4GB or 8GB of flash data storage. It’s also got three different wireless technologies inside: a
`standard GSM cellular connection with support for AT&T’s EDGE network, support for 802.11b/g Wi-Fi
`networks, and Bluetooth.
`
`The many faces of Apple’s iPhone
`
`Bright, clear display
`The iPhone’s display is excellent. Yes, it’s big and bright, but its most impressive trait is its high resolution:
`It’s 160 dpi, more than twice the traditional Mac screen resolution. Jamming that many pixels together in
`such a small space means that everything on screen looks smooth, not pixelated. Digital photos and
`videos look gorgeous, and even the colorful icons on the iPhone’s home screen are so bright and clear
`that sometimes it’s hard to believe that you’re looking at a computer screen and not something physical,
`like a sticker. On-screen text looks sharp, more like printed text in a book or magazine than drawn with
`pixels on the screen.
`
`Of course, the iPhone’s screen isn’t just for looking at: It’s the key driver in the device’s interface. Using the
`iPhone is a tactile experience—it’s all about touching your fingers (or, if you’re daring, your thumbs) to that
`screen. Instead of dragging a scroll bar or clicking a mouse, you move through screens on the iPhone by a
`combination of taps, flicks, and other finger gestures.
`
`The original Macintosh changed the world by providing a physical control to move a cursor around on a
`computer interface. But the iPhone does it one better—instead of pushing around a mouse in order to
`make a disembodied arrow or hand move up on the computer screen, it’s your finger doing all the moving.
`When you touch a photo, Web page, or e-mail message on the iPhone and slide with your finger, it moves
`along with your touch, as if you were moving a real, physical object. There’s no cursor on the iPhone
`because your finger is your pointer—which, despite what your mother might have told you, is just what
`fingers are designed to do.
`
`

`

`Fingertips on virtual keys
`If pointing is a natural act, typing on a keyboard (especially a tiny one) is its antithesis, but it’s a necessity of
`our modern age. After the crash-and-burn of the Newton’s handwriting-recognition interface and even
`Palm’s original Graffiti writing system, the makers of most mobile devices settled on tiny, chiclet-style
`keyboards as the best way for people to input text.
`
`The iPhone’s designers seem to agree that typing is the best way to enter
`data on a small device, but they’ve ditched the physical keyboard and
`replaced it with more touchscreen space. When you’re using the iPhone
`and reach a point where you need to input text, a keyboard automatically
`slides up from the bottom of the screen.
`
`The abolition of a physical keyboard is probably destined to be the iPhone’s
`most controversial feature, at least at first. There’s a bit of a learning curve
`when it comes to using the iPhone’s keyboard, especially for people who
`are comfortable using the physical keyboard on a Blackberry, Treo, or other
`smart phone.
`
`I can’t say that my typing experience with my previous phone, a Palm Treo,
`was particularly good. I could manage, but never felt that I could reach an
`acceptable typing speed. As a result, it’s hard for me to put myself in the
`place of an accomplished Blackberry thumb typist who has spent a year honing his or her skills. But I
`believe that most users—even thumb typists, given an open mind and some training time—will find the
`iPhone’s keyboard to be excellent.
`
`It does take some getting used to, however. That’s because the iPhone’s keyboard is a failure if taken
`literally. If you slowly tap every single letter and painstakingly backspace if you press the wrong one, you
`will never be satisfied. The iPhone’s keyboard excels when you ignore your mistakes and keep on typing,
`because it senses your finger presses, compares all the nearby keys to its built-in dictionary, and intuits
`what you’re actually trying to type. Over time, as it learns the kinds of words you type, it improves its auto-
`correcting accuracy.
`
`Within a few hours with the iPhone, my finger was flying over the keyboard, and I’m sure my fingertip was
`only getting roughly close to the correct letter most of the time. But the iPhone’s software, with remarkable
`consistency, knew what I had meant to type. I assume that with some practice, two-thumb typing would be
`even faster, but with my index finger I managed to type faster than I ever have on a tiny device, physical
`keyboard or not.
`
`The iPhone’s key layout is smart, too: it changes what keys appear depending on context. For example, in
`
`

`

`Safari’s URL window, you’ll be presented with a .com key. In an e-mail window, you’ll only be provided with
`characters that can be part of a valid e-mail address. One inconsistency is the presence of a horizontal
`keyboard when the iPhone is in a landscape orientation: it shows up in Safari, but it would be nice if you
`could rotate other applications, such as Mail, in order to take advantage of a larger keyboard.
`
`One iPhone text oddity is that the device has no concept of a text selection, let alone copy, cut, or paste.
`You might think that touching your finger and dragging it across text might select it, but it doesn’t—Apple
`uses that gesture to bring up a magnifying glass so that you can correctly reposition the insertion point
`(which is a great idea).
`
`Without copy and paste, you can’t (for example) compose a blog entry in the notepad while in Airplane
`mode and then paste it into your blog-posting tool in Safari when you’re back on the ground. Yes, you can
`e-mail that note, and if your blog tool has an e-mail-to-blog gateway, that’ll do in a pinch, but the lack of a
`better way to transfer text from one place to another can generally hamper interaction between different
`iPhone programs.
`
`iPhone calling
`It’s easy to get lost in the hype about touchscreens and Web browsers and forget that the iPhone is, like its
`name says, a phone. And it works pretty well as one: When an incoming call arrives, the iPhone gently
`interrupts what you’re doing to display Caller ID information about who’s calling. You can set any of 25
`built-in ringtones as your ring and assign custom ringtones to individual callers. Unfortunately, you can’t
`use your own music or sounds as ringtones.
`
`Once a call is in progress, the iPhone’s large screen gives Apple room to make it clear what your options
`are while on the phone, including placing people on hold and creating conference calls.
`
`The iPhone uses iTunes to sync the contents of your Mac’s address book (or a set of groups within the
`address book) with its internal contacts list. Although I was initially resistant to the idea of syncing over all
`my contacts rather than just a group containing the people I was most likely to call, in the end, syncing
`everything is probably the best approach, since your contacts are also used for e-mail addressing.
`
`Fortunately, the iPhone remembers which contact group you were looking at most recently. So even though
`my iPhone contains all 207 of the contact records I’ve got on my Mac, when I tap Contacts I see only the
`contents of a “Phone” group that I created within the Mac’s Address Book. (If the person I need to call isn’t
`in there, I can tap on a back arrow and browse the entire contacts list or a different contact group.)
`
`In fact, the stickiness of your current contact group is just one example of an effect you’ll find throughout
`the iPhone’s interface: When you return to a task you were previously using, things will generally be just as
`you left it. For example, if you’re looking at a Mail message and then press the Home button to check stock
`
`

`

`quotes, when you tap on Mail again you’ll be back to that same message.
`
`The iPhone’s Phone application is a five-tabbed interface that lets you quickly get to a numeric keypad for
`“old school” dialing (especially useful if you’re trapped in a phone tree), see your contacts, and get a list of
`recent calls.
`
`There’s a Favorites list, too, so you can create a short list of your most commonly dialed numbers.
`However, creating and accessing favorite people should be easier than it is right now. To add a contact as
`a favorite, you have to tap on the name in your Contacts list, then scroll down to the bottom of the contact
`record and tap Add to Favorites, then—if they have more than one number—pick the one you’d like to add
`as a favorite. There’s got to be an easier way, like tapping on a name and dragging it onto the Favorites
`icon.
`
`The iPhone also lacks a quick-dial feature that you’ll find on many other phones, in which you hold down a
`particular button to call your most frequently-called contacts. Obviously the iPhone can’t map contacts to
`buttons it doesn’t have, but top contacts are probably a few too may taps away.
`
`When you’re on a call, tapping the screen brings up six commands—Mute, Keypad, Speaker, Hold,
`Contacts, and Add call. That last command is particularly noteworthy, as it’s an example of the kind of task
`that can be confounding on other smart phones while being drop-dead simple on Apple’s handset.
`Whether you’ve initiated or received a call it’s an easy matter to put one caller on hold while you contact
`another and then bring the three (or more) of you together in a conference call. If only our phones here in
`the office worked as intuitively.
`
`One of the iPhone's most unique phone-related features is Visual Voicemail, which displays messages by
`showing you the name of the caller and the time of the call; messages that you have not listened to yet are
`marked with a blue dot. Tap on any message and that message will be played back, regardless of its
`position in the message queue. While listening to a message, a progress bar shows the length of the
`message and current playback position, letting you jump back and forth with the drag of a finger—no more
`listening to entire messages over again just to hear that phone number you missed the first time. There’s
`also a large green Call Back button to return the person’s call (assuming the caller didn’t have Caller ID
`blocked) and a large red Delete button. It’s a fresh approach to voicemail, and a welcome change from the
`kludgy menu-driven Voicemail systems with which most mobile-phone users are all too familiar.
`
`One of the most useful interface touches on the iPhone is the method you use to scroll through a massive
`list of information: a strip with every letter from A to Z which runs vertically down the right side of your
`contacts list (as well as most lists in the phone’s iPod functions). Touch the strip with your finger in the
`general direction of the first letter of the contact name, song, or artist that you’re looking for, and the list will
`jump to that letter.
`
`

`

`If you want to use a Bluetooth wireless headset with the iPhone, you should be able to do so without much
`trouble. I easily paired the iPhone with a Plantronics headset, and my colleagues have had success with
`headsets from Apple and Aliph. However, the iPhone doesn’t currently support stereo headphones, nor can
`it pair with your Mac for such tasks as passing files, using the iPhone as a modem, or passing call
`information to your Mac.
`
`One-handed e-mail
`The explosion of interest in smartphones is because they’re a mixture of two great tastes that taste great
`together—cell phones and e-mail. And the iPhone’s Mail program is excellent, capable of displaying
`formatted e-mail messages, including many common attachment file types.
`
`The Mail interface is a simple hierarchical list that lets you tap through to different accounts (if you’ve got
`more than one account, as I do). If you’re using IMAP, you’ll see a list of all the mailboxes that are a part of
`your account. Once you’re in a mailbox, you can see a list of messages, complete with the name of the
`person who sent it, the message’s subject, and, optionally, the first few lines of the message.
`
`Using Mail on the iPhone couldn’t be much easier: tap the New Message icon to create a new message,
`and then choose a recipient from your Contacts list (or type in an address yourself). If you’re reading a
`message, pressing the reply button will give you the option of replying to or forwarding the message.
`
`It’s no fun entering in e-mail settings on a computer with a full keyboard, let alone on an iPhone’s virtual
`keyboard. So Apple has tried to make e-mail set-up on the iPhone easy, and it has largely succeeded,
`albeit with a few caveats. When you first set up your iPhone, iTunes transfers all your mail account
`preferences from your Mac’s copy of Apple Mail. If those accounts are the only ones you want, you’re set.
`
`But if you need to enter in account info yourself, Apple has created several account presets that work for
`some major account types: Yahoo, Google’s Gmail, AOL, and Apple’s own .Mac. Setting up those services
`was very easy and required a minimum of data entry.
`
`If you’re not using any of those services, however, you’ll have to enter in a bit more data. And you’ll
`probably discover one of the iPhone’s major interface mistakes: there’s no option to display the text of the
`passwords you’re entering. That’s a fine security measure, but when you’re typing on the iPhone’s teensy
`virtual keys, and most likely not typing any sort of character string that the iPhone is good at auto-
`correcting—at least not if you’ve got a decently secure password—it’s very difficult to carefully enter in
`your password and make sure you’ve done it properly. I managed it by pressing my finger down on the
`keyboard and, if the letter that popped up wasn’t the one I wanted, deliberately sliding my finger until the
`proper key registered, then picked up my finger. But for long or numerous passwords it’s a big pain, and
`something Apple should fix.
`
`If you’ve never used a mobile device for e-mail before, you’ll also discover that you may need to change
`
`

`

`some of your mail settings (or change servers) to get the best e-mail experience on the iPhone. After
`entering all the data for my office’s mail server, I was confounded by an error when sending mail. At first I
`thought that I had entered my password incorrectly (hence the repeated visits to the password entry
`screen), but it turned out that my mail server wasn’t listening for outgoing mail messages at the same
`location (SMTP port, for you mail geeks out there) as the iPhone wanted to use by default. After some
`research I discovered what SMTP port we were using, and appended it (preceded by a colon, of course) to
`the name of my mail server in my mail settings. It worked, but it was the kind of difficulty that will drive most
`people to tech support.
`
`Moreover, the iPhone doesn’t filter mail, nor does it have any built-in spam catcher. That means if you’re
`relying on a client-side filtering program such as C-Command Software’s SpamSieve (
` ), you’ll be
`stunned at the amount of spam you’ll see on your iPhone. The solution: Use a mail server with server-side
`spam filtering, if you can. If your server also offers other server-side filters, it might be an opportunity to
`redirect some mail you don’t want to get on your phone, such as messages from mailing lists, elsewhere.
`
`iPhone Mail has a few other idiosyncrasies that I hope will be addressed in the future. By default every
`reply you send quotes the entire message you’re replying to, with your response at the top. This didn’t
`bother me, but that style of mail drives some people crazy. And since there’s no way to select a mass of
`text and delete it, there’s really no way to get around the default reply style. There’s also no way to select
`all of your mail at once and delete those messages or mark them as read. It’s not a show-stopper, but it is
`annoying.
`
`Another, much more minor, missing feature is the ability to assign signatures for each of your e-mail
`accounts. You can have a signature (by default it’s “Sent from my iPhone”), but that signature is applied to
`every message you send, regardless of account.
`
`Big Web, little window
`At numerous public appearances, Steve Jobs has promoted the Web-browsing experience on the iPhone
`as one that brings you the “real Internet”—in other words, the experience of viewing the Web via a full-
`fledged computer browser, not dumbed-down pages simplified for mobile phones (or, what’s worse,
`complicated Web pages that a puny cell phone browser can’t properly render). By embedding a version of
`Safari on the phone, Apple has brought the iPhone most of the way toward that goal, but it still falls a few
`notable steps short.
`
`When you’re using Safari on the iPhone, you feel as if you’re using Safari on your Mac. Web pages load in
`full, scaled-down to fit on the iPhone’s screen. Tap twice on any part of the page and Safari automatically
`zooms in, making text readable and enlarging photos to fill the screen. The experience is as close an
`approximation to the Web you experience on your Mac as you could possibly get on a screen the size of
`
`

`

`the iPhone’s. Web-page text is a pleasure to read on the iPhone’s high-resolution display.
`
`Your bookmarks even come along for the ride, because iTunes syncs bookmarks between your Mac copy
`of Safari and your iPhone. (It’s a two-way sync, so don’t delete bookmarks on the iPhone unless you’re
`willing to lose them on your Mac too.)
`
`If the iPhone is a success, the iPhone Web story will improve, too: Web developers can custom-build style
`sheets to work with the iPhone, as well as make some basic additions to their pages to improve the iPhone
`browsing experience.
`
`Loading Web pages on a Wi-Fi network felt about as snappy as it did on my Mac, but when I switched over
`to AT&T’s EDGE digital cellular network, things bogged down. I found browsing the Web on the EDGE
`network less pleasurable, but still quite usable (though it’s worth noting speed of the network can vary
`widely).
`
`Safari on the iPhone even has a clever way to support multiple open Web pages at once: tap the Window
`button and the current page pulls back to reveal that it’s one in a chain of up to eight different pages. If you
`click a link that’s set to open in a new window, Safari handles the process itself, zooming you out of your
`current page and sliding you over to the new page.
`
`However, there are a few limitations that prevent Safari on iPhone from truly showing the real Internet. The
`biggest is the fact that perhaps the most common browser plug-in in existence, Adobe’s Flash, is nowhere
`to be found. Over the past few years, the melange of different browser plug-ins for features such as
`embedded Web videos have largely been replaced by a single video player format: Flash. Although the
`iPhone’s included YouTube player solves the problem for that popular video-sharing Web site, it doesn’t
`address the larger fact that numerous Web sites use Flash to play video or display other interactive
`content.
`
`The iPhone also won’t play back Web audio or video being streamed in the Real or Windows Media
`formats, although Mac users can play such media on their Macs.
`
`Less major though still annoying, is the lack of support for file upload via Web pages. It would be nice if
`Safari allowed users to upload certain kinds of content in order to, for example, post pictures taken with the
`iPhone’s built-in camera to the Flickr photo-sharing site. (An alternative would be for Apple to add support
`for photo-sharing-site uploads right into the iPhone’s Photos program.)
`
`iPod reborn
`The iPhone’s iPod functions are like no iPod we’ve seen before—but I’d hazard a guess that they closely
`resemble the look of iPods to come. Without a scroll wheel to use in navigation, the iPhone’s iPod features
`take some getting used to. It took me quite a while to figure out how to toggle into and out of Shuffle mode.
`
`

`

`(The controls appear when you do a single tap on the screen.)
`
`When held in a vertical, or portrait, orientation, the iPhone’s iPod menus are reminiscent of the old iPod,
`but with much more detail. Instead of a main menu, there’s a row of five buttons along the bottom of the
`screen. You can customize four of them with elements you might remember from the iPod’s main menu
`(including Artists, Genres, Videos, and Podcasts). The fifth, called More, is the home for all the options that
`didn’t make it onto the row of buttons.
`
`When you’re in a list—of artists, for example—you can scroll through it by flicking your finger, or use the
`same vertical A-to-Z quick index feature that’s present in the Phone’s Contacts list (assuming you’ve got a
`long enough list of artists or songs). Tapping on an Artist brings up a list of albums or, if they have only one
`album, a list of songs from that album. Conveniently, you can now choose to begin shuffling at almost any
`point: all songs, all songs by a particular artist, or all songs in a particular album.
`
`When the iPhone’s in a landscape orientation, the iPod interface switches into Cover Flow mode, in which
`you flick through a row of album covers. Find a cover that looks intriguing, and tap on it to see its contents.
`It looks great, but I’m still not convinced about how useful Cover Flow is as a feature—on the iPhone or
`anywhere else.
`
`Due to its large, high-resolution screen, the iPhone excels as a video player. It’s the largest canvas a video
`iPod has ever had, at 480-by-320 pixels. (The current video iPod’s display resolution is 320 by 240.) And
`the widescreen aspect ratio, while not quite a Hollywood-standard 16:9, is still better for watching
`widescreen movies and TV shows than the 4:3 ratio of the video iPod.
`
`Of course, the iPhone doesn’t have a large hard drive on which to store a massive video library. That
`means you have to be judicious with the amount of content you load on the iPhone. And if you convert your
`own videos (from DVDs or other sources), you’ll want to spend the extra time compressing and resizing
`them to fit on the iPhone. But I was able to load up my 8GB iPhone with 350 songs and eight hours of
`video, and still have 3GB left over. So while loading an entire season of a TV show onto an iPhone is
`basically impossible, there’s certainly enough room (especially in the larger model) for a nice selection of
`viewing options. And in a nice touch, the iPhone offers to delete videos off its flash drive after you’ve
`viewed them, to free up more space.
`
`There are also several things the iPhone doesn’t do that the iPod does. It won’t output video to a TV, for
`one, and its iTunes synchronization process is much more like Apple TV than an iPod. I often drag-and-
`drop music and video onto my iPod when I attach it to my Mac, but the iPhone will only sync with a library
`or playlist on a specific Mac or PC. If you want to drag-and-drop, you’ll need to do it into a playlist that
`you’ve set to sync with the iPhone.
`
`There’s also no support for embedded lyrics in music files, and no voice-recorder support, either with the
`
`

`

`iPhone’s internal microphone or with various iPod voice-recorder add-ons.
`
`And there’s more
`It’s easy to focus on the iPhone’s four core
`programs, but there are 12 other icons on that
`Home screen. A few of them are full-blown
`applications, while others are nothing more
`than simple Dashboard-style widgets.
`
`The Text program, which has been built to
`resemble iChat, works quite well as a
`messaging tool for the cellular network’s SMS
`text-message protocol. I was able to send
`messages directly to other phones, status
`updates to Twitter.com via its SMS gateway,
`and even chat with someone who was using
`iChat via AOL’s SMS gateway.
`
`Application icons on the iPhone’s Home screen
`
`That’s the good news. The bad news is that Text can’t send MMS messages, which are similar to SMS
`messages but can contain multimedia. Because of this limitation, you can’t send a picture you snap with
`the iPhone’s camera to another phone via Text. (You could send that photo via e-mail.) What’s worse, the
`iPhone has no support for any Internet-based instant-messaging network. AOL’s SMS gateway works okay
`in a pinch—and when your buddies are initiating the chats—but it’s no replacement for a full-blown AIM
`buddy list. And if you’re in a location where you’ve got Wi-Fi network access but no cellular service, there’s
`no fallback.
`
`The iPhone is dying for a full-blown instant messaging program, and Text doesn’t fit the bill. Although I
`don’t have any inside information, I assume the choice of SMS support over instant-messaging support
`has something to do with the fact that AT&T makes money on SMS message plans. But SMS simply isn’t a
`replacement for instant messaging, and Apple should make the addition of a chat program a priority for a
`future iPhone software update.
`
`The Calendar and Notes programs help the iPhone fulfill its role as a personal information manager, but
`they’re like night and day when it comes to their utility. Calendar is implemented beautifully, with a useful
`Day view and a mega-useful List view of all upcoming events. You can add and edit events and sync them
`back to iCal on your Mac.
`
`Calendar’s big limitation is that it doesn’t color-code differences between different synced calendars, and
`new events can’t be assigned to particular synced calendars—they all automatically get assigned to a
`
`

`

`single, default calendar. And neither Calendar nor any other iPhone program will let you display or edit your
`iCal to-do lists.
`
`In contrast, the Notes program is fairly useless. It’s cute, with its brow header and yellow legal-style ruled
`background. But notes don’t sync back to your Mac, so you have to e-mail them from your phone if you
`ever want to free them from the iPhone. And not to get too font-nerdy on you, but the Marker Felt font used
`in Notes is extremely ugly and, sadly, can’t be changed. (Here’s hoping that when Leopard arrives, with its
`system-wide support for notes, you’ll be able to sync iPhone and Mac notes.)
`
`If there’s ever been an example of Apple’s software-design prowess, it’s the Maps program on the iPhone.
`Maps is powered by the same data you get when you visit Google Maps with your Web browser, but its
`interface is so slick—from the ease of finding addresses in your contacts list to the whizzy turn-by-turn
`direction animations—that it not only puts the Google Maps implementations on other cell phones to
`shame, it makes the Google Maps Web site itself look dowdy.
`
`The only thing missing from the Maps equation is that the iPhone doesn’t know where it is. Not via built-in
`GPS (it has none), nor by triangulating signal strengths from nearby cellular phone towers. It’s too bad,
`because with some knowledge of where it’s currently located, the iPhone’s Maps program would be
`perfect.
`
`A trio of iPhone icons—Calculator, Stocks, and Weather—will be familiar to anyone who has used their
`Mac OS X Dashboard Widget equivalents. They’re harmless, attractive, and functional. They also point out
`how, before too long, the iPhone’s Home screen will need some sort of management tool. Not just because
`Apple will no doubt add to the 16 icons currently on the screen—but because some people will want to
`hide icons that they don’t use. For example, I wouldn’t mind if I never saw the Stocks icon ever again. I’m
`sure someone else feels the same way about Weather. And who knows? Perhaps those who hate math
`might want to kill Calculator.
`
`The Clock program, on the other hand, is more than just a pretty face. Yes, it lets you see what time it is in
`major metropolises such as London, Moscow, and Cupe