Apple iPhone > Reviews > This Apple is a peach

Author's product rating:   

Look & Feel	Excellent
Durability & Robustness	Strong
Reception quality	Good
Battery standby time	Good
Value for money	Good
Range of features	Large selection

Advantages:	Genius design   -  too much is wonderful to mention here
Disadvantages:	the recessedheadphone jack and the on screen keybaord; no 3G

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Over here in the UK we had a long enough wait for the iPhone. Then the rumour mill started churning about possibility of a 16GB iPhone. Wow! Well first we didn't believe it. Then we waited. And waited. And craned our English necks to see what we could see over the pond, and finally it arrived.

The wait is over and the 16GB iPhone is on UK shores. It costs GBP499 at the moment. That's not exactly cheap. Since it was announced last year, the iPhone (8GB version) was hailed as the greatest technical product since the crystal sets and everyone just HAD to have one as soon as it came out. So we all bought one, and Apple then brought one out which is twice the size. A tad annoying if you'd just bought the 8GB version perhaps, but good news if you didn't. Yes, the 16GB costs more, but oh oh oh, what a thing of beauty this is....

THE LOOK OF IT:
Hold the iPhone in your hand. It feels all square yet curvy at the same time. You could be Captain Kirk talking to Scotty in the engine room it's so space age. It has a 3.5in screen and a one button front. It's a phone Jim, but not as we know it.

THE FIRST TOUCH
Unlike most phones, you don't have to press a pile of buttons to get it working, you just slide your finger over the on-screen bar and move it to the right to switch it on. Cool. You're now in the icons and away! The phrase "wow factor" was invented for this product.

THE NEXT TOUCH
As you explore it, you discover the wonders of its multi-touch technology. Of course we have seen touch screens before. Why, I wrote with a stylus on my dinosaur of an iPAQ classic five years ago. But this is different. It is intuitive, responsive, fun and as easy to browse the web on as using your PC or Mac. What's really different about this multi-touch screen is that it can detect the presence of more than one finger. Browsing pictures is almost like ice-skating; you just flick your fingers across, moving them together to zoom in and apart to zoom out again. Ooh I think I'll do that again.

THE BUILT-IN MP3 PLAYER
Now Apple have produced this 16GB version, the iPhone gives the iPod Touch a run for its money as the greatest MP3 player you can buy. You look through your music using the CoverFlow browsing system, which activates automatically when you turn the iPhone on its side. CoverFlow allows you to view your music by the album cover; touching an album will spin it around to reveal its contents. Oh that's so beautiful. I wish I'd even known I could want that.
With the advent of the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, you can also download tracks directly to your iPhone. This is far quicker than sync-ing your iPod to a desktop first and all that and if you buy the iTunes Plus ones - the DRM-free versions which are available for many songs - you can copy them on.

WI-FI CONNECTIVITY
Here is one area where the iPhone does not win all the plaudits. It doesn't have 3G. Instead it has this O2 EDGE network which might be better than crawling to your web destination using GPRS but really isn't making the best use of the iPhone's capabilities. It does come with free connection to a large number of wi-fi hotspots though, so it picks up a few points again for that. You can email, attaching photos you've just used the iPhone to take, browse the web and keep a calendar. It has a separate You Tube browser thingy and one for Google maps as Safari can't cope with flash pages, but apart from that, you can do anything. The Apple safari browser really does have to be seen to be believed. It is awesome. Actually I think in a wi-fi hotspot it is honestly faster than my desktop at home.

THE KEYBOARD
Yeah, all right, you got me again. This isn't quite cool. The onscreen keyboard can help you talk gobbledegook really quite easily. Don't they know that texting is hard enough for the over thirties? It doesn't always let your fingers do the talking. I'm getting better though, with practice. The trick is not to think about it too hard and let it all just flow. Man.

AND ANOTHER THING
It has the universe's most irritating headphone jack which is recessed (why?) so no headphones other than the not very good ones that come with it will fit. Grr and double Grr. With 16GBs I can have all my music on here and I'd like to actually be able to listen to it with good headphones if I choose to. Fortunately Belkin have come to the rescue and sell an adapter. Heck, I can afford a 16GB iPhone. What's a bit more money?

SUMMARY
With the exception of these couple of niggles, the iPhone remains uber-chic and super-dooper fantabuloso. The English language doesn't really have the words to describe how excitingly brilliant this is. There are actually more useful and powerful phones out there; there are even some with a similar range of features, but also with 3G connectivity and a proper blinking keyboard. But none, oh none, will make your heart beat like this one. Even my next door neighbour's cat wants one. Well, after all, it's cool for cats.