iPhone review - entire rest of the review
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The iPhone can do a number of Internet-related activities, which mostly include e-mail, web surfing, and the use of a few Dashboard-like widgets that make use of the Internet connection. Of those who contributed to this review, most of of our use of the iPhone revolved around using it as an Internet device and therefore, this is where the meat of the review lies.
The iPhone can use the Internet via one of two connections: WiFi and AT&T's EDGE network. Let's just get this out of the way right now: whenever you're within range of a WiFi network that you can use, use it. While some of us here may be identified as EDGE sympathizers at times (it's truly not that bad, on principle), AT&T's EDGE has proven to be, at the very least, inconsistent. Speeds vary wildly between great and eye-stabbing, and they are highly dependent upon your location, the time of day, and phases of the moon. Okay, maybe not that last one, but it's possible.
AT&T's EDGE doesn't appear to be as quick, overall, as the EDGE connection provided by other networks (namely, T-Mobile). We have been able to surf in multiple web pages at a time, e-mail, IM, and IRC all at once while on an EDGE connection on our laptops using a BlackBerry as a Bluetooth modem. While it's not the fastest connection in the world, it was doable in an emergency. AT&T's EDGE does not seem like it would be quite as tolerable in such a scenario, as it can sometimes take ridiculous amounts of time to load web pages on the iPhone. For example, certain sites (like Ars Technica's main page) took up to 71 seconds to load upon first blush, however Safari's caching on the iPhone does a good job of ensuring that subsequent loads are very short—the second time we loaded Ars in the same session took about five seconds.
That said, AT&T's EDGE is not unusable on the iPhone (most of the time)—it has just proven to be pokier than desired at times when looking up information was critical during our testing. On average, we concur that it was annoying-but-tolerable.
The iPhone is aware that you will probably want to connect to WiFi whenever possible (thanks iPhone), and will only connect to EDGE when it cannot connect to a WiFi network or if you have WiFi turned off. You can also change the settings so that it asks you whether you want to join available networks when you come within range or not.
The iPhone currently only supports 802.11b/g networks, not 802.11n. This comes as a disappointment to many people who already own draft 802.11n hardware, including Apple's own Airport Extreme Base Station. There is a lingering confidence among the iPhone-using community that a software update to enable 802.11n on the iPhone is forthcoming, but for the time being, it's just not possible.
Selecting and joining a WiFi network is as simple as tapping on the desired network and entering the password (if one is required). You can specify a static IP or a proxy server, but the default settings have the iPhone picking up an IP automatically through DHCP, and this works most of the time.
For a few days, we ran into some issues using our home WiFi network on the iPhone while still being able to join and use others. The iPhone was able to join the network just fine and even go so far as to pick up a correct IP, but just absolutely refused to make use of the connection. This was eventually remedied by restoring the iPhone to its original configuration through iTunes and then re-syncing it with the data stored from our last sync.
Web browsing on the iPhone is a dream. Of those who contributed to this review, we come from all different walks of mobile web browsing, ranging from being limited to the horrible, GPRS-induced, mobile-page-only, "baby" Internet on the RAZR V3 through the much more real Internet on the Blackberry and BlackBerry pearl using Opera Mobile, and [whatever browser] is on the Motorola Q. And yet all of us considered the iPhone's web browsing experience to be far superior to anything that we had ever used prior.
Safari on the iPhone is sort of a hybrid browser that resides somewhere between Safari 2 and 3, as discussed on Infinite Loop. The main differences are that iPhone Safari has more CSS support than Safari 2 on the Mac, but less than Safari 3 on Mac and Windows. But otherwise, it functions as a full-blown, computer-based web browser and can load any web page that is compatible with similar versions of Safari on the computer. We not only browsed sites like Ars Technica, CNN, Chicago Tribune, and other text-heavy sites, we also used interactive sites like Gmail, Twitter, PayPal, Peapod for grocery shopping (let us tell you, you rarely feel like more of a yuppie than when you're buying groceries online through Peapod via the mobile web browser on your brand new iPhone), and Outlook Web Access.
[pics of web pages]
If you chose to sync your bookmarks and browser history with the iPhone, it has everything stored as if you were on your home computer. This means that you can either access your bookmarks by going to the bookmark menu...
[pic of bookmarks]
...or you can begin typing in the URL and the iPhone will search your bookmarks and history to find sites that match up. If the site you're trying to go to shows up in the list underneath the address field, all you have to do is tap it to load it in a browser window.
[pic of list]
As you've probably seen in Apple's demo videos and other reviews thus far, a web page loads in its entirety in each browser window, shrunk down to fit the screen. Zooming in and out of various parts of the window is simple and can be done in one of two ways: double tapping on a section of the browser, or "reverse-pinching" (where you start with your thumb and index fingers together and move them away from each other). There are advantages and disadvantages to both. For me (Jacqui), double tapping can sometimes accidentally click on links in whatever part of the page that you tapped on when you weren't intending to click those links, which can be annoying. So I have gotten into the habit of reverse-pinching everything to zoom in, which works well for me. However, to other users like Ken and Clint, double tapping is the way to go because if a web page is separated into sections and div tags, double tapping on a certain area will zoom into that div (for example) so that it fits perfectly to the screen.
Some sites, however, don't play nice with the double tapping zoom. For example, Outlook Web Access (mobile version) merely acts like you've lost your mind when you double tap the screen to zoom in, rendering the site largely unusable. It does, however, work when you reverse-pinch to zoom in, and we think this is because the mobile version of Outlook Web Access is rendered entirely in JavaScript with no divs for the double tap to focus on. Only experimentation can reveal which sites play nice with which zooming method.
Our favorite part about the browser, though, is the "tabs." They're not actually tabs in the traditional sense, but they function the same way that tabs in a normal browser would function. You can load multiple browser windows at once and switch between them whenever you want without having to close them or stop their activities. Even though getting into this habit can remind you of how slow EDGE is when you're sitting on the train trying to load six pages at once, it's still a multitasker's dream to be able to do this on a mobile device in this manner. When scrolling (or "flicking" as the case may be) between your open tabs, Safari shows you a shrunken-down version of the site as well as the name of the site at the top of the screen so that you're never confused as to what you're clicking on.
[pic of tabs]
[video of Safari use]
There are, however, a few downsides to the current incarnation of Safari on the iPhone. One major caveat that everyone seems to be talking about is Flash support—as in, there isn't any. There is also no Java support (there is JavaScript, of course) either, although both of these are rumored to be coming in future updates. And for some things, the mobile version of a page still works better than the full version. For example, the mobile version of many Google apps, such as Gmail, Google search itself, and Google Calendar, all are formatted for mobile use and therefore will require less horizontal scrolling in order to read everything on the page if you were to load the "normal" versions of these pages.
A nit that we would like to pick with Safari's interface on the iPhone is that there is no way to search the loaded page for a word, like you can on the computer. This wasn't a need that we ran into every day, but it came up several times during our testing and it would have been nice to have. Hopefully this is a feature that will be added to Safari in the future. Another nit is that Safari doesn't have a global way to save your logins and passwords for various sites like most modern browsers. If you surf to a site that allows you to check a box and remain logged in, Safari will respect that and you will remain logged in until the cookie expires or you log out. But for sites like Outlook Web Access, there is no way to store your login and password and must enter it every single time you go to the site.
We have also managed to crash Safari a few times in our testing. For most of us, there was no consistency in our crashes so we're not exactly sure what caused them, but (at the very least) when Safari crashes, it doesn't take down the whole phone. It merely boots you back into the home screen as if you had just pressed the home button. For others of us, there were consistent Safari crashes—one of our testers says that he was able to reproduce a Safari crash every single time he loaded three web pages in three separate tabs. This was not the case for the rest of us, however. Of the rare crashes that we did experience, they were not reproduceable—for example, one page that crashed Safari the first time was a page that had an embedded QuickTime movie in it, but when we went back to the same page later, Safari loaded it fine.
Speaking of QuickTime, one cool little tidbit is that Safari will display that there's a QuickTime movie in the browser, but if you select it to watch, the iPhone will load the movie fullscreen and fade out the background while you watch the video.
[picture of QT?]
There are other helpful little tidbits, too. Everyone is mostly aware now that the iPhone lacks cut/copy/paste capabilities, which does indeed suck. However to make up for it, Apple has built in a few little helpful functionalities, such as the "Share" function in Safari. When typing in a URL, you can tap the "Share" button at any time, which will send that URL to a new e-mail. You can then e-mail the link to anyone you want.
Overall, Safari on the iPhone provides a superior mobile browsing experience that is unmatched even by the BlackBerry (which in itself provides a far superior browsing experience than most mobile phones in general). This may in fact be the best part of the phone overall.
Oh e-mail, where do we begin? The iPhone's e-mail client is simultaneously a blessing and a curse, and for a variety of different reasons. E-mail can be set up either manually through the iPhone's interface or by syncing with the computer. We synced all of our e-mail accounts with a Mac when first setting up the iPhone, which included one IMAP-enabled Exchange server and two POP-enabled Gmail accounts. The experience was so seamless that it was almost laughable—we were able to start sending and receiving e-mail almost immediately after purchasing the iPhone without having to enter any settings whatsoever.
On Windows, that experience was slightly different. [explain Windows pain]
[pictures of mail listings]
Setting up new e-mail accounts through the iPhone's interface isn't difficult, however. There are several presets for common mail servers, such as Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL, or you can enter all of your own settings if you want.
[picture of common mail listings, picture of custom settings]
The iPhone's mail client does not currently have "real" Exchange support—it can be used with Exchange servers that have IMAP enabled, however. This comes as a huge frustration to throngs of business users who might want to use the iPhone as a replacement BlackBerry, push e-mail and all. Once again, this is a feature that is rumored to be coming via software update in the future.
For now, users are limited to setting their iPhones to check for e-mail periodically. In the iPhone's settings, you can specify whether you want the e-mail checks to be completely manual, check once every five minutes, once every half hour, or once every hour. The more often you have the iPhone check various e-mail servers for mail, the lower your battery life will be because it will constantly need to ping the servers. For most of the time we had the iPhone, we chose to have it check once per hour and manually when we needed to in between. One thing that we would love would be the ability to set different e-mail accounts to check at different periods of time, but this isn't hugely important.
The first two things that anyone who uses e-mail a lot will notice is that the iPhone's mail client contains absolutely no spam filtering whatsoever, and that there is no way to mass delete e-mails. If you have e-mail accounts that get a lot of spam—even if your mail client on your computer catches most of it, as ours do—you are going to get every single one of those in your iPhone's inbox. And when they come flowing in en masse, you have to delete every single one of them, one by one.
[picture of e-mail deleting]
[video of e-mail deleting]
There is also no way to mark a handful (or all) e-mails as read in a particular inbox. This can be infuriating upon first sync with the e-mail server when you have hundreds of messages pouring in as "new," but anytime you receive large batches of e-mails at once from a POP server (for example) that you have already read on your computer. E-mail accounts that sync through IMAP function just as IMAP would on any computer, however, and so e-mails that are read on a computer are not marked as new on the iPhone and vice versa. The iPhone's mail client also gives you the option to leave individual e-mails marked as unread, if you so choose.
Aside from these annoyances, we felt that the e-mail client was, overall, decent. It certainly looked good, and sending and reading e-mail functioned as expected. It's not difficult to figure out whatsoever, and I would consider the "Mom Factor" of the e-mail client to be decent. Sending e-mail is where syncing your address book with the computer comes in handy, too. Beginning to type in e-mail addresses will prompt the client to attempt to autocomplete them for you based on who is already in your contact list. This is of course handy, saves button presses, and saves time.
[picture of e-mail sending]
Like BlackBerrys, the iPhone comes (by default) with its own little "Sent from my iPhone" signature. This can be edited within the iPhone's preferences on the device itself to say whatever you want. Mine now has my entire Ars e-mail signature, but I kept the iPhone line at the end as a caveat so that anyone reading my e-mails can understand why they might be shorter and more to-the-point. The downside to changing the sig to be more your style, however, is that the same sig is used for every single e-mail account on the iPhone. I currently have my standard Ars Technica sig set up on the iPhone, but it ends up being tacked onto every e-mail I send, even from my personal accounts. Mail.app on the Mac allows you to have different signatures for different accounts, and this would be a greatly appreciated feature on the iPhone as well.
A minor-yet-helpful feature request that we'd like to see in future versions of the iPhone software would be for Growl-like e-mail alerts to pop up on top of other applications when an e-mail comes in. This happens when you receive a new SMS (which we will talk about when we get into the phone stuff later), along with the new SMS sound and a short vibration. Currently, when a new e-mail (or three, or ten) comes in and you're in another application, it only rings the new mail sound and vibrates. You have no idea how many e-mails you've received, who they're from, or what accounts they are on. A simple, semi-transparent pop-up like the one provided for SMS messages displaying even just the subject line and who it's from would be a nice addition to the mail interface, with a button asking whether you want to view or ignore it. Please, Apple, make our dreams come true.
[more e-mail stuff????? Ken, I'm sure you have rants on this topic]
Just like Google maps on a computer, Google Maps on the iPhone allows you to search for businesses or addresses nearby using any number of criteria. "Restaurants near 400 N. Wells Chicago," "Fogo de Chao Chicago," "Starbucks near 60640" all behave as they would on the computer, with pins popping down from the sky into the map. You can then tap on any of these pins to get more information on that business, such as their phone number, web address, street address, or tell it to give you directions to or from there. Tapping on the web address will load that page in a new tab in Safari, and tapping the phone number will allow you to make a phone call to the business.
[photo of pins, photo of more info]
Getting directions works the same way. Enter a start and end address (or if you followed the instructions from above to go to a location that you have searched for, one of those fields will already be filled in for you), and you're on your way with step-by-step driving directions. The map will display your start and endpoints with a purple line on the streets in between, with the actual directions displayed across the top.
Tapping "Start" will begin the directions. It will tell you exactly how far to go on each street and tell you where to turn. When you have completed that step, tapping the forward arrow will animate the map to display the next step, and if you accidentally go too far ahead, you can always tap the back arrow.
[picture of directions]
What's cool about getting directions is that you can save bookmarks for favorite or common locations. This is helpful when you are consistently starting or ending at the same place (such as your home), so you only have to enter one address when retrieving directions.
[photo of Map bookmarks]
Again, contrary to early rumors, the iPhone does not currently have a GPS device. It is also unable to triangulate your location based on cell towers (the carriers are currently required to do so for emergency calls, but none have yet implemented such a feature for customer use as far as we know), and so the only way for Google Maps to know your location is when you put it in. This may prove frustrating for those of us (such as Jacqui) who almost never know exactly where we are, but the tool is useful nonetheless.
[video of Google Maps]
Google Maps on the iPhone can also display realtime traffic data (for roads that it can get traffic data from, anyway) as well as satellite images. This makes finding specific buildings easier as well as letting you know which highways to avoid before you get there.
Google Maps on the iPhone actually works almost exactly the same way as it does on the BlackBerry. The look of the maps are the same, the functionality is the same, even the directions are the same. The only differences between Google Maps on the iPhone and Google Maps on the BlackBerry is that on the iPhone, there are lots more animations (pins dropping, animated maps between directions, etc.) and entering addresses looks much prettier. Also, the BlackBerry lacks a location bookmarking feature, although it does remember past addresses that you have entered (as does the iPhone).
YouTube was added as an iPhone "feature" just weeks before launch, at the same time that YouTube started appearing on the Apple TV. Although it may appear as if Apple has created a direct portal to YouTube from the iPhone, that's only partially true. The iPhone does not currently support Flash video, and so Apple actually reencodes every single video from YouTube to H.264 video for streaming onto the iPhone and the Apple TV. As of the time of this writing, Apple does not claim to have reencoded all YouTube videos just yet, but hopes to have the full YouTube catalog available by the fall.
Using the YouTube widget is simple to figure out—you can look through a list of favorites, popular videos, recently-watched videos, or search for your own videos. Tapping on a video in the list will bring it up in full, widescreen mode.
[picture of lists, searching, widescreen]
You can share a link to any given YouTube video by tapping the e-mail icon, which will open up a new e-mail with a link to the YouTube video inside.
[picture of YouTube e-mail]
This feature is certainly cute, and handy when you're bored out of your mind and have already surfed the entire Internet in Safari. However, it's not exactly a major productivity app, and so we wouldn't exactly cry if it went away. We'd be willing to trade YouTube for some of the other nits that we have picked thus far, without a doubt.
Other widgets included on the iPhone that make use of the Internet connection include the Weather widget, Stocks widget, and the Clock widget. These all look and work in the exact same way as they do on the Mac's Dashboard. You can keep track of any number of time zones simultaneously through the world clock, enter all of your own stock symbols to constantly monitor them in the Stock widget, and keep track of the weather forecast for as many cities as you'd like in the Weather widget. Again, helpful, but not required to have a fulfilling iPhone experience.
[pictures of other widgets]
Overall, we considered the Internet experience on the iPhone to be a good one. There are a number of e-mail related caveats and gotchas that we would like to see fixed in future revisions, but it doesn't render e-mail entirely unusable (more like "annoying to use at times"). Web browsing is fantastic, and the widgets are helpful, if you're into that sort of thing. Through multiple tests, we were able to get just a hair over four hours of solid Internet use out of the iPhone on both EDGE and WiFi. Apple advertises up to six hours on WiFi and with various specific settings (auto brightness off, for example). We felt that ~4 hours straight was a decent amount of time for the device to last for these activities—not mind-blowing, but not disappointing. Of course, the iPhone is not a full-fledged miniature laptop, and therefore most people won't find themselves surfing for 4+ hours on the iPhone in a single session anyway. On the other hand, none of us would argue if we could squeeze a couple more hours out of that puppy.
As a phone, the iPhone works reasonably well. In order to dial a number that's not in your contacts list, all you have to do is hit the Phone button from the home screen and make sure that you are on the keypad, then dial away:
[picture of keypad]
To call a contact, tap Contacts once you are in Phone mode, and you will see a list of contacts to choose from. Tapping that contact will show you all of his or her information, and if there are multiple phone numbers to choose from (say one for work, one for home, and one mobile phone), you will be able to choose which number to call. Tapping that number will automatically call that contact.
[picture of contact]
You can also keep a list of Favorites within the Phone part of the iPhone. Here, you can store whoever you want—people you call the most, people you have a crush on, whatever. Adding a new Favorite is easy—all you have to do is tap the "+" sign on the top right of the Favorites screen, which brings you to your full Contacts list. Select a contact and a number for that contact to add to the Favorites, and you're done.
[picture of adding a Favorite]
While on a call, you can do a number of things, such as swap calls (if you have more than one person on the line), merge calls (so that you are having a conference call), mute, switch back to the keypad, go to speakerphone, and view your contacts. You can also go back to the iPhone's home screen and do any number of non-phone activities while on the phone, although this means that you must be conducting the phone call part of your multitasking adventure over a headset of some sort. Regarding the conference call features, you can conference in up to five people at once.
One of the major omissions about making calls, of course, include the lack of voice dialing. This is a feature that people either use all the time or don't care for whatsoever, but the "use all the time" people are definitely going to be annoyed. So much for making handsfree phone calls while driving.
Call quality of the iPhone over AT&T appeared to be "okay" from both ends. Although no one had any particular complaints, we weren't writing home to mom and dad either. At times, we felt that the volume was a bit low even while maxed out, however. This can prove to be difficult in louder environments. It wasn't intolerable, but we would like for the max volume to be louder. The speakerphone volume was the same—tolerable, but quiet. If attempting to use the speakerphone to conduct a call in anything but a quiet room or office, doing so might end up proving to be an exercise in frustration. The quietness of the speakerphone is somewhat puzzling, as playing music can get to be pretty loud when maxing out the volume. This is a major downside for some who use the speakerphone a lot, and so we can only hope that Apple does something to remedy the volume issue in future iterations of the iPhone.
Visual voicemail is a new feature introduced by AT&T and Apple with the iPhone that currently only "works" over AT&T's network. Instead of requiring the user to dial up the carrier's voicemail number and listen to his or her voicemails in the order that they were received, visual voicemail lists each message out in visual format on the iPhone. It displays who the voicemail is from (and if it doesn't recognize the number, it will analyze the area code and tell you what geographical area it's from, which is helpful) and the user can tap whichever one in the list that he or she wants, no matter its position in the list. When the voicemail is playing, the user can pause it, scrub back and forth in the message, or skip.
The way it works is actually not as magical as AT&T might like you to believe, although the technology is still AT&T-specific. The iPhone actually downloads sound clips of the voicemail messages off of AT&T's server, presumably over EDGE, and stores them in temporary files on the iPhone's flash storage. This allows the iPhone user to select messages to listen to out of order, because all he or she is doing is listening to an audio file. This is also what enables the user to scrub with the touchscreen and listen to different parts of the message. It's a nifty bit of technology, but really only required AT&T's voicemail servers to tell the iPhone when to download a new message and then the iPhone takes care of the rest. In our tests, visual voicemail worked as advertised and we had no trouble with it. It is, however, a feature that we would be more than willing to sacrifice if we had the opportunity to use an unlocked iPhone on another network.
SMS on the iPhone, for those of you who SMS a lot (like some of us do), is nothing short of amazing. For those who don't "get" SMS or send a grand total of three text messages per month, you may just want to skip these next couple of paragraphs altogether. But if you are a big text messager, you will appreciate the SMS interface as much as we do. Unlike pretty much every other phone on earth (including BlackBerrys), the SMS interface on the iPhone is set up conversation-style, complete with colored chat bubbles like Apple's chat program on the Mac, iChat. Instead of showing a giant list of incoming SMSs and a separate list of outgoing SMSs, with multiple conversations mixed together, the iPhone displays each conversation as just that: a back and forth conversation that can be read over and actually understood. This makes the SMS experience infinitely better.
[picture of SMS bubbles]
The iPhone keeps a log of all the conversations you have had (or are currently having), separated out into each individual. You can clear the chat history at any time by tapping the "Clear" button at the top of your conversation.
[picture of list of SMS convos]
[video of SMS demo]
Clearly, SMS is set up in a way that makes it as visually pleasing and useable as possible, which we love. However, keep in mind that AT&T's default rate plans for the iPhone don't include unlimited SMS messages—they include 200 messages per month unless you add extra SMS plans onto your plan. Chatting this way can easily rack up your SMS charges if you're not careful. One major thing to note is that the iPhone does not currently have MMS support--that is, you can't text message your friends a photo or movie, for example, and they can't send you one either. If someone tries to send you one, the iPhone displays a SMS saying that the person tried to send you an MMS and that it can be viewed online. This is quite a puzzling omission for the iPhone and we can only hope that it's added in the future.
The natural assumption, too, is that SMS is meant to be used as a chat client on the iPhone, which is both good and bad. Bad, because it draws attention to the fact that the iPhone does not currently have any sort of non-SMS chat client. There have been some iPhone-compatible web apps written that allow people to log into their AIM accounts and have chat sessions with friends, but currently there is no native iPhone application that supports IM. Even the lamest of phones (such as the RAZR) have an IM client, and so many people view this as a severe lack in functionality. As per the usual pattern, the rumor mongers have said that iChat (Apple's chat client on the Mac) support will be coming very soon to the iPhone, and we feel confident that it will. However for now, the lack of an IM client is disappointing.
We have one very major complaint with the iPhone as a phone/SMS device, however, and that is (once again) the volume of the alerts. There are several problems here, wrapped into one overall problem:
Let's talk about that last one for a moment. Each available ringtone is not created equally, and they ring (no pun intended) over other noise differently. Almost every single one of them is extremely quiet when the ring volume is maxed, and can easily be missed while merely going about your business in daily life. The volume seems suitable when playing in a quiet room, but even doing so much as entering your car and putting on the radio can provide enough noise to override your ringer when you get a call. This goes doubly so if you go to a bar, restaurant, or club—you may as well not bring your phone at all, because no one will ever be able to get ahold of you—or if you are even walking down a busy street, riding a train or bus, or even just in another room of the apartment or house. What is the point of having the iPhone carry phone functionalities if you're missing calls over half of the time?
These are not made up scenarios, either. During the entire time we had our iPhones to test, we missed calls in nearly every scenario possible. As an example, while driving our own car with the iPhone sitting on the dashboard in plain view with the car radio on moderately loudly, we missed two phone calls with the ringer on Marimba and the volume on max. We found that the only available ringtone that is loud enough to be heard in most scenarios is the "Old Phone" ringer, and we've found that many other iPhone users in the wild agree. The overall ringer volume is way, way too quiet.
Even worse (if that's possible) is the max volume on the SMS/e-mail alerts. They are virtually inaudible altogether if you're not in a completely quiet room, even when you are listening carefully for them. In a moderately populated bar, restaurant, street corner, or office building, we would go so far as to say there's no chance in hell that you will ever hear an SMS come in. And forget ever hearing it from another room if you're relaxing at home and your iPhone isn't directly in front of your face. Again, while some of you may not "get" SMS and don't care about this, this truly is a serious problem for those of us who rely on it. Jacqui and Clint communicate with friends and family members on-the-go almost exclusively via SMS at times, and without holding the phone in your hand so that you can feel the vibrations, you will truly miss lots and lots of messages.
To demonstrate, we recorded a short clip of three phones receiving an SMS message on max volume, with the microphone about three feet away from all phones in a silent room. The first phone is a BlackBerry Pearl, the second is the iPhone, and the third is a Motorola RAZR. If you only hear two, that's because you missed the iPhone in the middle. Listen carefully; you're more likely to hear the buzz of the vibration against the table than the actual SMS noise.
[insert audio clip here]
The fact of the matter is, the RAZR's volume can be set to "offensively loud" when necessary, although it's rarely needed. A volume of 4 out of 7 bars on the RAZR is still plenty loud enough to hear from buried within a bag or pocket in any public setting or from across the apartment. A maximum volume on the iPhone in the same scenarios is the equivalent of being set to silent.
All of that said, we found the vibration on the iPhone to be very strong. As we mentioned above, you're more likely to hear it vibrate (if sitting on a table) than the audio alert for e-mail or SMS, and it's definitely strong enough to let you know you're getting a call, e-mail, or SMS in your pocket. And depending on where you put it in your bag (Jacqui puts her phone in the back pocket on her messenger bag so that it's up against her body), you might even be able to feel it that way too. Overall, our review team felt that the vibration on the iPhone was stronger than most other devices that we had used.
Finally, there's no way to talk about the iPhone's phone capabilities without addressing the atrocity that is AT&T. We wanted to like it, we really did. But AT&T's coverage was spotty at best in several cities in the US (Boston, Cincinnati, and Chicago) that we tested it in. We felt that we could go to any random location within our respective cities and completely lose AT&T signal altogether, rendering us unable to make calls or use EDGE for the Internet, while our other phones on Verizon and T-Mobile had full signal. In the interest of remaining fair, we all attempted to find places within our respective cities where the opposite would be true, but we were unable to. At "best," we would lose signal for AT&T and the other carriers at the same time, but never just the other carrier instead of AT&T. AT&T was far more likely to provide spotty coverage than any of the others, in our testing. This makes it that much more unfortunate that the iPhone is currently tied to AT&T (at least if you get to choose your own carrier, it's at least partially your own fault for choosing a carrier with crappy coverage). But the current tie-in, combined with mediocre cell service, leaves a bad taste in our mouths. We can't wait until third parties start selling unlocked iPhones, even if that means they'll be sold for an even higher premium than they already go for.
Battery life for the iPhone, used solely as a phone, was difficult to determine. For one, there are few people who are willing to talk to you for 7-8 hours straight, period, much less on a cell phone, and much less sometime during the week that doesn't directly overlap work or sleep somehow. Because of this, we weren't able to reliably test the battery life of talk time on the iPhone, however other reviews (such as the one by Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal) have referenced the battery lasting for just over seven hours on a full charge when used as a phone only. Based on what we know from Mossberg, of our other battery life tests, and the time we did spend on it as a phone, we would estimate that the talk time on the iPhone would probably fall in the 6-7 hour range.
With all the hubbub about what the iPhone can do as an Internet device and a phone, it's sometimes easy to forget that it's an iPod too. But it's not like any old iPod—both the interface and the controls of the iPod in the iPhone are different from what we know and love from iPods past. Naturally, because there is no longer a scroll wheel or center button, Apple had to re-engineer how the iPod controls are manipulated. While they did a fine job at it, changing volume through anything but a circular scroll wheel just doesn't feel the same.
That said, the interface is similar to that of the "regular" iPod, and just as intuitive. Through a series of icons at the bottom of the screen once you enter into iPod mode, you can look at your playlists that you have synced, a list of artists, songs, and videos. Scrolling through the lists is done the same way as scrolling through anything else on the iPhone: using your fingertip, you flick up and down in the list (or drag along a slider) until you find what you're looking for. A few taps later (depending on what you're looking for), and you're listening to some jams.
Let us preface this photograph (and all subsequent photos and videos) by saying that we have since discovered, through doing this review, that Jacqui's laptop apparently houses the worst possible "collection" (if you can call it that) of music ever. She doesn't use her laptop to store her actual collection of music, and therefore it seems to acquire random bits and pieces of rather questionable albums. Okay, we'll stop making excuses. We blame Clint.
[picture of iPod interface]
If there is album art available for your music, the iPhone will display it to you nice and huge while you listen. If you turn the iPhone sideways into landscape mode, the interface will automatically change to Cover Flow mode—the mode that allows you to scroll through your albums as if you were flipping through a virtual library of records. This is the first time that Apple has implemented Cover Flow into an iPod-like device, and it has proven to be much more useful on the iPhone than on the computer for navigating through music. It's extremely visually pleasing and a fun thing to show onlookers.
[picture of Cover Flow]
Videos on the iPhone are displayed horizontally, the same way that YouTube videos are displayed. They're shown in fullscreen mode with controls that disappear after a few seconds, but touching the screen will bring them back if you want to skip ahead, back, play/pause, or scrub.
[picture of My Humps]
The iPhone can play movies, music videos, and video podcasts from the iTunes Store, but it can also play other videos. Anything that is compatible with iTunes can be transferred to the iPhone—it's making your videos iTunes-compatible that can be the tricky part. Programs such as QuickTime Pro ($29 from Apple and both Mac and Windows compatible) have a built-in preset to "Export for iPod" and "Export for Apple TV," both of which export videos in an iTunes-friendly format that can be played on the iPhone. There are many other software options available for both platforms that can convert videos to an iTunes-friendly format, some of which we discuss in our recent Apple TV review.
Audio quality on the iPhone is good. To our untrained ears, songs coming from the same 256kbit MP3 files sounded identical on the iPhone and a 5th generation video iPod. We would have tried it with both the included Apple earbuds and a set of Sony MDR-V700s, but... well, there's that recessed audio jack on the iPhone. Much to the fury of many audiophiles and people who just plain hate Apple earbuds, Apple has chosen to recess the audio jack at the top of the iPhone just enough so that using another pair of earphones with it is very difficult, if not impossible. And so, the Sonys would not fit into the audio jack, and we were forced to stick with the Apple earbuds alone.
[picture of earbuds]
For those of you who absolutely cannot live without your Shures, all hope is not lost. The iPod accessory industry has flourished for many years and has now begun to expand itself out to include iPhone accessories. So far, Griffin Technologies has already announced a headphone adapter for iPhone that will plug into the recessed jack and allow you to plug in whatever headphones you please to the other side. The product is "coming soon," but it's not unreasonable to believe that it and similar products from other companies will flood the marketplace within just a few weeks. It's unfortunate that Apple is making people purchase extra accessories in order to use other headphones, though.
Speaking of the earbuds, however, they're not just your average Apple headphones. They are the version of the headphones that come with new iPods, but with a special little speaker/clicker thing built into the cord. What good is this? Well, it serves two purposes actually. When listening to music on the iPhone, clicking the headphone clicker can play/pause the music, even while the iPhone is on standby.
A cool feature of the headphones, though, is that they can also be used to take calls. If you are listening to a song and a call comes in, you can click the headphones to pause the music and answer the call. The clicker acts as a microphone, so you can conduct an entire phone call through the included Apple headphones. To hang up, you can click it again and return to your music. One pleasant surprise is that the included Apple earbuds don't appear to be susceptible to the infamous "GSM buzz" when a call comes in. If you're listening to music, it gracefully fades out temporarily to let you know that a call is coming--none of that nasty buzzing. However, don't think that the iPhone is immune to the buzz in general: several readers have reported to us that the GSM buzz coming from the iPhone in general has been nasty at times, especially with large speaker systems at home.
Overall, the iPod functionality was cool and very easy to learn. It wasn't something that we (members of the Ars Technica staff) used as the main function of our iPhones, but it certainly adds some usefulness to the device. If you're the type of person who carries around both an iPod and a phone, the iPhone certainly offers a nice marriage between the two in one gadget. And especially if you're not the type to carry around 80GB of music with you at all times, the iPhone could potentially replace your old phone and your iPod nano/shuffle (or other small, flash-based music storage device). However if you absolutely need to carry gigs upon gigs of music with you every day, then an iPhone definitely won't replace your larger, hard-drive based music player just yet.
Regarding battery life, we were able to get about 12 hours of audio playback when listening to a playlist on repeat for half a day straight. Apple advertises "up to" 24 hours of audio playback based on certain configurations of the iPhone's settings (WiFi and cell phone capabilities turned off). But unless you're on an airplane, virtually no one is going to turn off the cell and WiFi capabilities of their iPhones when deciding to watch some video, and neither did we. Instead, we kept our iPhone on the standard settings that we had set it up with—WiFi and EDGE on, regularly checking e-mail in the background every 30 minutes, etc. 12 hours is quite a bit below Apple's claim of 24 hours, however, and more on par with Apple's claim for the battery life in the 30GB iPod (14 hours, which usually tends to be more like 8 hours in real world scenarios). Other publications have reported that they have gotten much closer to 24 hours of battery life while using the iPhone as an iPod (and with WiFi on), so we're not totally sure what's going on here with us. We were able to get roughly five hours of video watching time out of the iPhone, compared to Apple's claim of up to seven hours.
Although we've already discussed battery life in several different capacities throughout this review, we feel it necessary to point out at this last mention that for average, on and off use throughout the day, the iPhone generally lasts about a day or slightly longer before needing a recharge. This is generally how most people use their smartphones, and so we were satisfied with the result. The overall "general use" battery life is on par with our other smartphone devices that we have used.
Camera
The iPhone comes with a built-in 2 megapixel camera on the back. The interface can be accessed by tapping the "Camera" icon on the home screen, and is very simplistic. Apple has animated a camera shutter that opens up when you select the camera, which also closes when you take a picture (probably to mask the time it takes to save a photo).
[picture of camera shutter]
The camera saves photos into its own photo album, both accessible through the camera interface and also through the photos interface (which we discuss next). From there, images can be viewed, deleted, set as wallpaper, or sent via e-mail.
[pictures of sending photo as e-mail]
One curiosity we had while testing the iPhone's camera is that it only sends a half-size version of the picture via e-mail, but stores a full-size (1200x1600) version of the photo on the iPhone's storage. There is apparently no way to change this setting, which is frustrating to many of us who want to eat up people's bandwidth by e-mailing full-size photos directly from our phones. For example, some of us e-mail pictures directly to our Flickr accounts from the phone, and having a full-size photo (instead of a half-size one) sent there would be the most preferable option. The only way to access the full-size photos from the iPhone is to transfer it to the computer over USB. If you have photos stored on your iPhone and sync it with a Mac, for example, iPhoto or Image Capture will start up and ask if you want to transfer the photos. We found the size limitation when sending photos via e-mail to be very annoying.
There have also been some complaints about the camera's quality in the iPhone, however we felt that it was largely acceptable for a cameraphone. To demonstrate the differences in photo quality, we took (roughly) the same photograph of some flowers on a car's dashboard with the iPhone, a Motorola RAZR, and a real camera, a 2.1 megapixel Canon SD450. Below are the results:
[pictures of flowers here]
The iPhone's photo picked up most of the same detail picked up by the Canon, although the hues are slightly different (the iPhone's hues appear to be quite a bit more cyan-heavy than the Canon). Obviously, the RAZR photo doesn't even compete, neither in resolution nor image quality.
Some major downsides to the iPhone's camera abilities is that it doesn't have support for digital zoom like most cameras do, and it has no setting for night photos (even the RAZR has both of these capabilities). Therefore, the iPhone can only take very limited photos in dim lighting, and almost no photos whatsoever when it gets downright "dark." Another glaring omission is the lack of video capabilities in the iPhone's camera--something that many very basic (and much cheaper) handsets can do. If Apple wants this to be a full multimedia device, adding video capabilities almost seems crucial. Plus, how cool would it be to be able to take video from the iPhone and then view it right there on that giant widescreen?
Photos
You can get photos onto the iPhone by syncing them through iTunes. On the Mac, iTunes gives you the option to sync your entire iPhoto library, none of it, or selected albums. When you choose to sync photos with your iPhone, iTunes "optimizes" the photos for the iPhone's screen, just as it does when you sync photos with the iPod. We believe that the "optimization" process means that iTunes is scaling down the photos so that they don't take up more storage space than necessary on the iPhone (obviously the iPhone's screen is not large enough to fully appreciate the full resolution, 8MB photos taken from your DSLR).
When doing this on the Mac, the photos made it to the iPhone in one piece and looked great. When doing this on one of our Windows machines, however, many of the photos appeared to be corrupted in some way, which we can only attribute to the optimization process on iTunes for Windows. Another one of our iPhone testers transferred photos to his iPhone from Windows, however, and they turned out fine.
Browsing photos on the iPhone is very simple. After tapping the Photos icon on the home screen, you are taken to another screen that asks which albums you want to view, which includes one album full of photos taken from the iPhone's camera (as mentioned earlier). Tapping on which album you want brings up a matrix of thumbnails from that album, and tapping on any one of the photos brings it up in full size. This is when changing to landscape mode can benefit the photo viewing experience, and you can move forward or backward in the photoset by dragging your finger across from left to right or right to left (to "flick," so to speak). This is similar to how you would change tabs in Safari.
Bluetooth
Bluetooth on the iPhone is, to say it nicely, very limited. There is one, and only one, function that Bluetooth can be used for, and that is to connect with a wireless Bluetooth headset. To people who are used to using their phones with their computers for much more, you will be sorely disappointed. We are.
Attempting to set up any type of syncing services with our Mac proved to be fruitless. The Mac recognized the iPhone as a bluetooth device but reported back that there were no services to be had:
[screenshot]
This sucks for a number of reasons. Probably affecting the most people, it obviously means that you won't be able to wirelessly sync the iPhone with the computer for anything whatsoever, even non-media items such as contacts and calendar info. We also hope that none of you are attached to using handy Bluetooth apps on your computers, such as Sailing Clicker and BluePhone Elite on the Mac. For those not familiar, these are apps that let you do all sorts of cool stuff such as have the Mac detect when you and your phone come within a certain proximity and run certain scripts at that time, automatically pause music when a call comes in, and send and receive text messages through your phone from the computer, among other things. These things can be done on practically any other phone with Bluetooth capabilities, and some of us have indeed become attached to using our phones with our computers this way. The iPhone's inability to connect to a computer in any meaningful way over Bluetooth leaves us very disappointed.
It also means that you can't use the iPhone as a Bluetooth modem. Some may ask "Who would want to on EDGE anyway?" Well, the answer is: we do. We mentioned earlier in the review that some of us do it somewhat regularly with a BlackBerry Pearl on T-Mobile's EDGE, which has saved us in a pinch on many occasions. Just because AT&T's EDGE is painfully slow doesn't mean we shouldn't be allowed to subject ourselves to that torture if we should so choose. Many people believe, however, that this limitation is one largely imposed by AT&T and not Apple, as carriers often have to jump through many hoops in order to offer a phone that can be used as a Bluetooth modem. Regardless of whose problem it is, however, the lack of this feature almost makes it a dealbreaker for some of us, as we view a smartphone as a device that can be used with a computer as well as by itself.
Calendar
The iPhone's built-in calendar mimics iCal on Mac OS X, but lacks much of iCal's core functionality. It acts as a calendar, of course, and lets you sync events with iCal on the Mac and Outlook calendars on Windows. It's quite useable on the iPhone, particularly because of the large screen, and looks great. But unlike iCal on the Mac, it doesn't have To-Do list functionality, and perhaps most annoyingly, doesn't have support for multiple calendars. So if you're meticulous about keeping different-colored calendars for different parts of your life such as Home, Work, Birthdays, Family stuff, etc., they'll all get mashed into the same calendar on the iPhone. The lack of To-Do lists wouldn't be quite as annoying to us if, say, the Notes functionality on the iPhone would sync with a computer, but curiously, it does not. Therefore, there is essentially no way to make a note to yourself and have it sync up with a computer at any time unless you simply send an e-mail to yourself.
Notes
Speaking of notes, the iPhone has a cute little Notes function that lets you make... you guessed it... notes to yourself. Oddly, the Notes section uses a different font than the entire rest of the iPhone (Marker Felt-ish), which cannot be changed and infuriates some users. It didn't bother us that much, though--maybe we're just too laid back or something.
The Notes functionality lets you create multiple notes, which are all day and timestamped when you view them in the main list. You can e-mail notes to yourself through the Notes interface, which is currently the only way to get a note off of the iPhone. You can also delete them using the little trash icon at the bottom.
[picture of notes]
[video of notes? same video as gratuitous animation though, decide where this goes!]
Software
If there's one thing that the iPhone has, it's great potential for software support. The Mac development community in particular is an extremely strong one and is capable of writing very useable and very useful apps. If not for this community, the Mac platform in general would barely have as much functionality as it does today. However, Apple has chosen to lock these developers out by currently not offering an iPhone software SDK (and instead attempting to argue that they can write glorious web apps via AJAX that can be run in Safari). The argument has been heavily in favor of security, with Steve Jobs spouting off in January about third-party apps potentially taking down entire networks. The argument was re-iterated more quietly at WWDC when an Apple employee discussed with us that the reason why Apple is hesitant to open up the iPhone is because everything on the phone currently runs as root and on the kernel level.
But Apple really does need to figure out some way to let third parties develop for the iPhone. If there is any single way that the BlackBerry smacks down the iPhone with a vengeance, it's in application support. On the iPhone, there is currently no easy way to read RSS feeds except through the browser (and frankly, that just doesn't work for most of us), there is no way to IM, and no way to edit any type of useful document (Word, Excel, PDFs). What we would like to see would be for developers to create applications that can be put onto the main home screen like dashboard widgets by the user—add an RSS reader here, get rid of the stock widget there—so that each home screen is customized to our personal use.
For now, software support is probably one of the iPhone's biggest weaknesses for smartphone power users.
albert.apple.com and returns a code that tricks the iPhone into activating itself without ever having to send any information to Apple and AT&T. This will of course only activate you iPhone to the extent that you will be able to use it as a media player and internet device. It is unclear whether or not you would even be able to make emergency phone calls using this and first methods described above.passwords file was extracted from this disk image and the two accounts present on the device, root & mobile—the user account—were cracked (in less than 16 seconds) as “dottie” and “alpine” respectively.What becomes readily apparent from watching the progress that these very dedicated and intelligent people have made over the 10 days is that Apple and AT&T have gone to great lengths to lock down this device. Contrary to Apple’s “hobby”, the Apple TV, the iPhone has been extremely resistant to attempts at making it do things that Apple and AT&T would prefer we didn’t. The iPhone will inevitably be hacked wide open—unless they’ve figured out something that Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, and a host of other huge, multi-national corporations haven’t. This will, however, most likely be a more difficult hack. As opposed to modding a console which deals almost exclusively with hardware and software that is self-contained on that device, breaking the iPhone includes those challenges, as well as a desktop application (iTunes), and a wireless network controlled by a third party (AT&T). While we’re sure that unlocked and fully configurable iPhones will eventually make their way into consumer’s hands; individuals who would rather not hack their iPhones and enter into a cat and mouse game that could leave your iPhone useless for extended periods of time are encouraged to direct their energy at pressuring Apple to open the iPhone to other major carriers in a more timely fashion.
Ever since we did our first iPod nano review with stress tests all those years ago, we have gotten a lot of requests for durability tests on other products. But no product since then has received nearly as many requests... until the iPhone. Readers have written from far and wide asking us to abuse our iPhones as badly as they do on a daily basis, because no one wants to plunk down $500-$600 for a device that (some believe) looks like it could scratch or break if the winds change.
Just a couple of weeks before the iPhone launched, Apple announced that it had pulled a switch-a-roo with the screen covering, from the clear plastic used on most iPods to a scratch-resistant glass. While viewed largely as a marketing move that was planned all along (Apple could not have made such a decision so close to launch time without severely pushing back production), the announcement did serve to soothe the nerves of many geeks who were worried about having to wrap their iPhones in silk-stitched bubble wrap in order to protect them from the world. But still, the questions kept coming in: "How durable will it be? Will it be able to survive the crap that I put my phones through?"
And so here you have it. You may have seen a few other reviews that attempted to "test" the durability of the iPhone, but none really went so far as to answer the questions that our readers had.
First, let us preface this by saying that, as many of you know, one of the official Ars Technica iPhones was put through a wedding during the weekend immediately after purchase. This involved at least two full days of jostling the device around, naked with no protection, in various bags and purses with things like keys, cameras, laptops, other phones, jewelry, pins, and more. And of course, lots and lots of showing off. During this time, it was dropped from standing height onto the linoleum floor twice during the reception, both by Clint and by another member of the wedding party. Neither of those drops caused any harm to the iPhone whatsoever, and the device came out from the weekend as if it were still brand new.
Throughout the week, we continued to be not-so-careful whatsoever with our iPhone. We sat down with the iPhone in various pockets (including the back pocket) with absolutely nothing to report afterwards. It was crammed into tight-fitting pockets with keys and other knick knacks, laptop bags with other electronic equipment and tools, purses with cameras and change and various metal objects... and we could not get the screen to scratch. We were beginning to lose hope that the screen could be scratchable at all—good news for you all, bad news for us.
We had to step it up a notch when we entered our formal testing phase, and so we placed the iPhone into a plastic bag with two sets of keys, a pocket knife, and a handful of rocks. Ten minutes of shaking, rubbing, and overall mashing resulted in almost nothing. Almost. One tiny scratch showed up in a somewhat inconspicuous place on the glass. In fact, it was very hard to photograph.
[picture of bag, tiny scratch]
We wanted to see whether we could get it to scratch up a bit more, and so we did two throws down the length of the sidewalk, face down. Surely skidding on the sidewalk would scratch the screen up at least a little bit, right? Sort of. We were able to generate a few very light scratches after skidding it down the sidewalk twice, none of which were visible while the LCD was on, and most of which looked more like streaks that could be wiped off than actual scratches.
We did, however, manage to create a tiny crack in the lower, right-hand corner of the glass next to the home button (out of the way of the screen itself) upon the second throw.
[pictures of post-skid test]
We then proceeded to drop the iPhone onto the concrete sidewalk three times. This essentially brought the iPhone drops from this height to about five times if you include the two drops at the wedding. None of these three subsequent drops caused any further damage to the iPhone's screen or glass covering, although it did begin to rough up the sides a bit.
[picture of sides?]
Naturally, if you drop an iPhone anywhere in public—on the street, in an office, etc.—you run the risk of someone stepping on the phone. We've received numerous reader e-mails saying that their phones, iPods, and other gadgets had been stepped on with varying degrees of survivability. This happens enough that we decided to add it to the tests, so we placed the iPhone face down on the sidewalk and had a 225 pound man (Mr. Clint Ecker) step on it while walking by.
We heard a crack, but we weren't sure what had happened until we checked out the damage. A large spider crack had appeared in the lower right of the glass, close to the Safari button on the home screen. However, while ugly, the crack was in the glass and not the LCD screen itself, and therefore did not impede our use of the iPhone at all. We could still make and receive calls, make and receive SMSs, send and receive e-mail, and listen to songs on the iPod.
The crack was much more noticeable in outdoor light compared to indoors:
[pics of giant crack]
...and less noticeable when the screen was on.
[pics of crack with screen on]
Since the iPhone had fared so well with other drop tests, we were curious as to how it would fare when knocked off of a third-floor balcony. When we did this test on the second-generation iPod shuffle, it practically floated down and landed on the ground like a leaf—such would not be the case with the iPhone.
[pic of iPhone on railing]
[Clint surveying the damage]
The drop from the third-floor balcony, surprisingly, did not yield any further physical damage to the glass or the screen that we could see. However, it did kill the iPhone's touchscreen, rendering it mostly useless. At least it still has that pretty rose background, right?
But we said "mostly" useless. Despite being put through a world of hurt and having a completely non-functional touchscreen, the iPhone was still able to receive phone calls. How were we able to answer the calls if you can't touch anything on the screen to answer them, you ask? Via those annoying-yet-handy iPhone headphones with the clicky switch, that's how. Call quality when answering a phone call after this much abuse suffered, however. It was very tinny sounding (this was not the case when we tested phone calls with the headphones before), and we thought it sounded like the caller might have had us on speakerphone (he did not). Also surprisingly, we were able to listen to a random selection of music on the iPhone through the use of the headphones' clicky button, and the now non-touchscreen LCD happily displayed the album art for it. Even the volume control buttons on the side of the iPhone still worked. So if you've always wanted the equivalent of a heavy iPod shuffle with a giant screen to display album art and the ability to receive phone calls, the iPhone still served its purpose.
We knew that the iPhone was coming to the end of the road, and so we performed the most-requested, and most sure-to-kill-the-iPhone test of all: the toilet test. If we had a dime for every single story we've heard over the years about people who have somehow managed to drop their phones into the toilet, we wouldn't be writing this review right now. If you don't believe this, just ask around among your friends and coworkers—there is sure to be at least a few stories of people's phones coming to an untimely meeting with our dear friend, H2O.
But not everyone's phones get fried when they get dropped into the toilet (or some other body of water). Because of the ability to take out the battery on most cell phones, some people (not all) have been able to save their phones from certain death by removing it from the water, taking out the battery immediately, and letting everything dry for several days. This was the case with a good friend of ours who was pushed into a fountain with his cell phone, a Motorola SLIVR, just a few weeks ago (long story). He thought the phone was dead, but he let it dry out for several days with the battery out and found that he was still able to make and receive calls on it.
We put on whatever random song that the iPhone chose for us (something by good old Justin Timberlake) and said what we believed to be our last goodbyes to the iPhone. Then, it went in the toilet.
[picture of iPhone in toilet]
About seven seconds later, the screen started flickering. Nine seconds after that, the music stopped playing. We took the iPhone out, let the excess water drain, did not remove the battery (since the battery is not user-removeable) and set it out on the back porch to dry out. But just as we suspected, the iPhone was fried; there was no reviving it.
Some will argue that if we had removed the phone from the water earlier, it might have survived. That may have been true temporarily, but due to the battery being non-removeable, we believe it would have died regardless. Water was able to seep into every crevice of the iPhone and would have made its way to the battery eventually, even if we had removed it from the water earlier.
If you're interested in seeing live motion of the stress testing process, check out our short film.
[video of stress testing]
We conclude that the iPhone is, for nearly all everyday uses, pretty darn durable and practically impossible to scratch. However, as with most electronics—particularly those with large screens—you should at least keep an eye out for hitting the screen at funny angles onto things like table corners and the like. Although even if you did that, the LCD itself would likely not crack and you would not lose any real functionality, but nobody wants ugly spider cracks in their otherwise beautiful-looking glass, right?
Now that we've tested the iPhone's durability, let's take a look inside.
The iPhone is truly a marvel of modern electronics engineering. Because of the extreme limits put upon cell phone manufacturers by the market to product thin, light, and extremely powerful devices, Apple had to squeeze a lot of circuitry into a small space. This paired with Apple's notoriety for producing exemplarily-designed products (even to the point of hindering the internal design of the device itself), Apple's product, electrical, and computer engineers no doubt had to work overtime to make the iPhone a reality.
Despite what you might think, the majority of iPhone is its massive battery and LCD display. The actual electronics and other sundry bits that power the functions that the end-user experiences are relatively small. Shown here are the main processor board and daughter board of the device (all the major and minor electronic components of the device) compared to two pieces of US currency.
When fully assembled in the device, all of the major chips that exposed in these photographs are sealed within RF shielding and the two boards themselves are attached via snap-together bus connectors (see above), forming a single, compact package.
There has been much speculation concerning which manufacturers would be providing the integrated circuit components for the iPhone, and while many of those can be divined from these tear-downs, a few of the chips inside the iPhone have not yet been fully identified (their purpose nor their manufacturer). Several organizations have speculated to these chips' purposes and origins, but as of yet there have been no conclusive results. Even those chips whose roles have been identified, as is often the case with Apple's cutting-edge devices, their existence has not been made public by their manufacturers via data-sheets nor promotional information on their websites.
Most notably missing from the group above is the main processor for the device. In January, Ars Technica was one of the first publications to pin the processor as a Samsung device. FBR Research came the to same conclusion independently. Ars Technica's reporters continued to dig, and by piecing together public information about Apple's work on LLVM, we came to the conclusion that the processor inside the iPhone would most likely be an ARM1176-series device manufactured by Samsung.
Several independent sources have taken the iPhone apart and come to the conclusion that the device is, in fact, a Samsung part, but we have been unable to confirm that information. We are unclear whether these entities are merely quoting the news was reported in late January or have come to an independent conclusion through other sources. However, at this time, we're still putting our chips on Samsung as the producer, and the S3C6400, or an unannounced next-generation device, the S5L8900, as uncovered by Semiconductor Insights' Greg Quirk.
There are a lot of things to love about the iPhone and a lot of things to hate. Considering every single use for the device is nearly impossible, as everyone uses their phones in different ways, even among the techie community. What constitutes a dealbreaker for some of us may mean nothing to you, and some details that send you into a rage may not bother us as much (or at all). Even among those who contributed to the review, we had different perspectives on how we view our phones and used the phone differently from one another.
That said, we love the concept of the iPhone. It's extremely easy-to-use, almost entirely self-discoverable, the interface looks better than any other phone—smartphone or not—currently on the market, and it's just plain fun to use. The iPhone brings the term "crackberry" to an entirely new level.
However, there are a lot of downsides, and as we said, some weigh more heavily than others to different people. To us, the most major downsides to the iPhone are the ringer/alert volume (this has turned out to be a major concern for almost everyone who contributed to this review), the inability to use it as a modem via Bluetooth or any other method, and application support. Without a dedicated RSS reader, for example, it's extremely difficult for Ars Technica staff members to use the iPhone as an actual business device—we are mostly limited to reading and responding to e-mail, and even that can be quite a trial at times. The keyboard is truly a matter of personal preference. Some of you will never like the keyboard, and some of you will be able to adapt to it easily.
It's clear to us that the iPhone wasn't meant, at the outset anyway, as a smartphone for smartphone people (who typically end up being business people). Instead, the iPhone was meant as a smartphone for everyone else—average people who, until now, had no reason or motivation to get a BlackBerry or something similar that may have been more difficult to use and way too many features for the average phone user. But the concept of the iPhone doesn't just appeal to average users—it appeals to everyone, including business users.
How do we rate a product that has so many different features and so many different caveats that matter to different people on different levels? The answer is that we can't, easily anyway. We can only rate it on our personal use of the device compared to our use on other similar-ish devices. For that, we give it a 6/7 [discuss score with as many people as possible!]. Our informal survey of as many current iPhone users as possible shows that average users (and a few not-so-average users) are, on the whole, very happy with the iPhone experience and only have a few minor nits to pick. A large majority of our readers who had used an iPhone, both Mac and Windows users, e-mailed us to say that they would give it a score of 9 or higher. We can't, in good conscience, give it that high of a score ourselves, but we recognize that it serves its purpose for most people.
The short explanation that we find ourselves giving people most often about how we feel about the iPhone is this: before the iPhone came out, we were planning to buy a new smartphone that was not the iPhone. We are still not buying an iPhone now, after having used it exclusively for some time. However, we are not buying something else either—we plan to wait to see what software (and hardware) updates might come out for the iPhone in the near future. We believe that the iPhone is cool enough to wait for whatever might come out, and we have confidence that many of the nits we have picked can be fixed through a major software update. But as the iPhone is right now, we can't quite justify dropping $500-600 on it today.
If certain "gotchas" matter more to you than it did to us, please feel free to subtract a point or two from the score for your personal score. If certain things that we cited as dealbreakers don't matter to you whatsoever, feel free to add to the score. The iPhone is, ultimately, a subjective experience, and we hope that our thousands and thousands of words on the subject help you decide whether it's worth the money for your personal use patterns or not.
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