The “Break it Down” Blog

• iPhone Review, Part 1 of 3
• iPhone Review, Part 2 of 3
• iPhone Review, Part 3 of 3

Yesterday we tipped off this review with the iPhone Gripes, today we are going to concentrate on making note of only what makes the iPhone awesome to give a good counter balance to it.

Let’s dig in…

My iPhone Praise

• Safari is a real browser
  • As I mentioned in my Gripes portion of the review, this is a good thing and bad thing. Bad because over EDGE, loading real web pages takes for goddamn ever… a good thing because you actually get to use/see web pages as they were designed, not some half-functional bastard version for a mobile browser.
• The build quality is insanely nice. The weight, feel, solidness of the iPhone is what I would classify as “perfect”. For example my BlackBerry Pearl is a pretty solid phone, but it does have a plastic body so there is some play/flex to it. The iPhone is like solid metal and glass, there is no play, and it feels awesome.
• Touch screen done right… not sure what to say here, the sensitivity of the touch screen, feel of it and quality of it are all spot on… I don’t really have any improvements to suggest here.
• Battery life is very good/excellent. I take my iPhone to the gym to watch episodes of TV shows when I’m doing cardio. I can usually watch about 3hrs of TV shows, listen to 2hrs of music and have a few long phone calls (30+mins) before needing to charge the phone. Not to mention email or just browsing on it. This usually comes out to every 3 days or so for me. If you are a phone junkie and ride the bus or something so you are always on your mobile device, as long as you have WiFi and Bluetooth off, I think you should be fine with 1 charge a day. If you are doing WiFi browsing, Bluetooth Stereo headset for hours and watching hours of video as well… you could probably make it on a single charge or a day or might need to top it off in the evening… it’s hard to say. Overall I just found the battery life really good for what I was doing.
• Interface is insanely polished. For example if you push your finger down to move the blinking cursor in a text field, you get this little magnified pop-out region that shows you up close where the cursor is currently… definitely made me go “wow… nice”.
  • There are other little tweaks you notice everywhere that are specific to this device being a handle-held, touchscreen device. For example, deleting something isn’t as easy as hitting the delete button (cause you can accidentally hit that any time). You have to go into Edit mode for most screens, then hit the “delete” circle next to the item then confirm the operation. All very fluid and smooth and completely avoids the “damnit my thumb hit it!” stuff that can happen on small devices, especially touch screens.
  • Also, eye-candy, but non the less appreciated, every menu transition and even most widgets are animated in a very fluid/smooth fashion. I don’t feel like I’m clicking on stuff in a hard sense, but rather “transitioning” and flowing my way through the interface.
• Screen quality is excellent. This is really the most revolutionary part, not only is it probably the nicest screen on a mobile device (even mobile devices made for movies) but it’s also a touch screen. It’s bright, has great colors and great viewing angles. No complaints here. I also use the device as a PMP at the gym when I’m doing cardio, it has saved me from becoming a giant fatass.
• Integration of Phone, Contacts, Google Maps, iPod and SMS are excellent. Every single menu, if interrupted by a call, fades out to show you the caller ID screen and choices to take the call or not. Contacts integrates seamlessly with Google Maps, so click a contact name and hit their address, no prompting, just boom… you get a map with their address marked on it.
• Performance of the device is excellent. I never feel like it’s lagging or bogged down doing something except a few times when I’m in the middle of rendering a heavy web page or playing a video and try and jump it out to do something. Other than that it seems to be performing exactly as designed with no lag or stuttering.
  • I’ve played probably 6-8hrs of video on the device and never saw a stutter or hickup that was performance related (had 1 encoding goof that I did).
• Has more than 1 button. Even though Jobs touted the big “1 button design”, if the iPhone had actually only been a 1 button design, it would have been obnoxious to do quick things like volume or lock the screen. Both mappings I make immediately to the soft keys on my BlackBerry. Fortunately there are actually a few buttons on it:
  • Lock Screen / Power Off
  • Silent & Vibrate Switch
  • Volume Up/Down
• Excellent mail support. I use Gmail and the iPhone immediately hooks up to the IMAP functionality with Gmail, but it also supports Yahoo, MSN and others right out of the box to make it brain-dead easy to setup. Even over EDGE email performance I would say is “good” and over WiFi it’s “excellent”.
• WiFi support. If you are in a WiFi enabled area, the iPhone will pick it up and use it instead of EDGE, so all email, browsing, buying music, etc. is seamlessly transferred over. Pretty awesome if you ask me.
• Data Syncing. On Mac your iPhone completely syncs with the iWhatever apps which is just awesome for calendaring, contacts, etc. Unfortunately Google-application syncing doesn’t exist which is a huge pain in the ass for me rght now, but as a middle-ground, I am syncing the phone successfully with Vista’s “Windows Contacts”. Unfortunately no sync support for Calendar and the iCal functionality on the iPhone is brain-dead, in that it’s either meant to be used directly or synced with your desktop, it doesn’t sync out to anything over WiFi (god I really wish it supported subscribing to Google Cals). I am happy there is some syncing though, and from my Mac friends with iPhones they says the syncing is pretty damn nice, so I made this a praise-point.
• Enterprise support just got announced and it’s set to beat the shit out of everyone. From the Mac conference yesterday Apple basically announced support for everything ever in the enterprise along with SDK-based apps… pretty huge actually, so for corporate users that’s a big boon.
• Part of that conference was to announce really generous app hosting and development setup Apple is extending to application developers. I think iPhone app development is going to blow the hell up in the next year because of this.

And that’s the praise list… the device is really awesome, but it’s not perfect. Tomorrow we’ll have the conclusion to wrap all this up with a nice tight bow.