Well, I guess every single blogger in the world has already done an iPhone story, but I might as well.
The fact is, it’s beautiful. It’s easily the best looking device Apple have made since the titanium Powerbook G4. The design has that sort of “Why on earth has no-one else thought of that?” feeling that only Apple seem to manage to do well nowadays. It makes the most use of the available space efficiently and prettily, it manages to fit full functionality into that small space, the touch interface appears to be very well thought out and it has a really good screen resolution. The fact that it can go from a normal phone call into a Blackberry-esque email system simply by clicking the right button is fantastic; it’s the big advantage of a touchscreen and they appear to have come up with a version that works.
Plus, it’s got WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0, so you don’t have to pay provider’s nasty internet rates nearly as often as you do with other such phones. This all needs to be factored in when considering its nasty US price ($500 for 4GB/$600 for 8GB, or going through the currency channel £250/£300 over here – although it’ll likely be less because of the British mobile contract system.)
Some of the caveats bloggers are tossing about aren’t really, for instance with regard to the battery life. The “5 hour” life Apple quotes is talk time, which is very different from standby time; the iPhone has so many proximity sensing features it’s almost certain to have a very good standby time, although it isn’t quoted on the technical specs page (although a 16-hour music only time is, which is about as good as my Creative Zen Touch). If left alone, as a mobile most often is, it’ll probably last a whole lot longer.
If we go to Nokia’s website and look up one of its comparable smartphones, for instance the N80, note the listed talk and standby times: the N80 has a talk time of “up to three hours”, two hours less than the iPhone even when GSM-only, while it manages a lot more on standby. The only people who will have their iPhone turn off after five hours are people doing lots of Web hopping and making constant phone calls, and these people will be just as unhappy with an N80. Or how about the Motorola Q (once you get past the obnoxious Flash anim, 4 hours quoted talk time)? Or maybe the Blackberry Pearl (3.5 hours)? The iPhone isn’t at all out of place in this market, really. The only comparable smartphone I could find with a better quoted talk time was the Sony Ericsson W950i, which manages 7h30 on GSM only (but drops to 2h30 on UMTS, which may explain the lack of 3G in the iPhone).
Certainly the iPhone isn’t perfect – the software lockdown is unnerving, although there’s enough unique software on there that finding equivalents for the stuff that isn’t really shouldn’t be a problem, and both the lack of UMTS and “US-only until Christmas” are really annoying – but you really don’t need to bash it for something which is true of every other phone on the market. Cisco willing, the mobile phone market is going to get very interesting from now on as Motorola et al desperately attempt to copy the iPhone’s looks and feature set, and good luck to them. They’re all going to need it.
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 
this stinks beyond all belief nerd!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! u are a loooooooooser
this is horrible
So which is nerdier then – me posting about technology that interests me or you posting moronic insults on a five month old blog post you’ve probably found through Google? I’m going to say the latter.
goo goo ga ga… weeeeeeeeee!
nice to see that 12 years olds are allowed to post and surf the net without supervision. Anyway enough of Mr Poo head, good article although Apple have now updated their website with the talk time data.
You now get 8 hours talk time on an iPhone. :)
Yes indeed they have. The music only time has gone up to 24 hours and they’ve given a big standby time too, confirming my suspicions in that regard; the iPhone appears to be much the same battery-wise, possibly a bit better, than any other phone on 2G-only mode. I can really see why they haven’t made a 3G version when you look at the figures.
I’m surprised I didn’t notice that other useless insult comment getting through – I must have been distracted by other stuff at the time. Oh well, I suppose it’s sort of a fact of life when you have a weblog that’s lasted as long as this one.
Nice! I heard Apple also said that after 400 charge cycles the battery has an optimum performance of 80%… So if you charge it everyday (heard it on the web they use to charge it that often) you will have 80% batt performance in just a year! and the ship-the-fone-to-get-its-batt-replaced scheme by apple is just annoying just by thinking about it… do you personally own the iPhone? can you tell me your fone’s current standby time now? thanks!
P.S. mail me…
I’m not an iPhone owner, no – as someone with only a pay-as-you-go phone anyway, it really isn’t for me. Now it’s opening up it’s becoming a lot more interesting, but I’m more interested in the iPod Touch anyway.
Worth pointing out that 400 charge cycles == 400 full charges, that is from zero. Most people don’t do that with iPods and iPhones, so the battery will be fine for several years to come (80% isn’t unacceptable either; it might be with something that only does two hours or so.) See here.
Most of these “battery failure” articles, which only talk about Apple despite the fact that everyone else uses the same types of batteries and pretty much no MP3 players now have user-replaceable batteries any more, not even the Zune (and at least you can get hold of third-party iPod batteries for self-replacement surprisingly easily, which you can’t say about most of the competition), are simply scaremongering.
“The design has that sort of “Why on earth has no-one else thought of that?” feeling”
You’ve obviously never seen a Dell Axim X50 or 51 PDA –