so yeah i was trying one out at an apple store yesterday just like a million other people..
i was impressed it worked as well as it did. i mean i didnt expect it to be that bad at all, its just.. i duno the whole ipod fad is annoying and seeing people waiting online for weeks for the iphone that didnt know much about it was also irritating. people waited online for days that didnt even know about service plans or that you HAVE to get the phone activated with a two year contract or else you cant use the ipod features... yes thats right, without activation the thing wont work, even as an ipod.. from what i hear alot of people (in my area atleast) wasted their time online because they planned on buying it for its touchscreen ipod features and not its phone..
i mean i did my research, i know enough about it to know i dont want one until its vastly improved, but since i was able to play with one i'll right up a mini review i suppose. here goes:
Size: i've read alot of dumb comments about the size... lots of people thought the thing was going to be a brick and would be uncomfortable in your pocket. some comments i read even had people insisting it was going to be bigger than the sidekick II when in actuallity its smaller than the sidekick III. Basically its about the size of your standard (30gb) ipod (havent yet held an 80gb, they seem a little thicker) and is pretty comfortable to hold, and pretty ligh wieght, not heavy at all.
Touch Screen:With my experience with it, im not sure how i feel about the touchscreen controls. at first they felt very responsive and of course naturally intuitive but other times i couldnt get certain features to work properly. for instance when typing a small keyboard pops up in standard format but the buttons seemed rather tiny and i felt somewhat intimidated to even try to type. I'd say I have average sized hands for a guy in his 20's, not too big and not too small, but i felt like my thumbs were huge in comparison to the keys.
i was surprised that just the slightest touch was very responsive in typing and it felt pretty easy to use once i dove into it. i didnt use the tips of my thumb like i do when texting on a phone, i found that if i did i'd mispell things more often because i was putting more pressure on a wider area. using the underside of my thumb worked fine. Still trying to type fast was a pain because its so easy to hit the wrong key but im sure once you're used to it it'll work out for the best.
My biggest complaint about it is this: You'd think that after typing out a whole word or sentance and you notice a typo that you'd be able to touch the screen to move the highlight bar to the middle of a word to get rid of the one wrong letter or so, but you can't. if you touch the front of the word the highlighter will jump back to the beginning, if you touch the end it'll jump back to the end of the word, thats it. This made web browsing a bit of a pain because if you typed in something like "Hooogle.cam" by mistake you'd have to backspace the whole word and retype it from scratch. Not very conveniant. Maybe there was an onscreen button i missed to move your highlighter back and forth but i doubt it becuase I handled the thing for awhile.
Web BrowsingI'll get my biggest complaint right off the bat: some pages seem to take too long to load. To be honest my experience with handheld browsers is limited. That is to say I've only ever handled small time browser like the sidekick and such. The ads are right about the iPhone; it doesn't use a "watered down" version of the internet, its just the internet. Maybe thats the difference since theres nothing taken off the pages like when browsing certain things on other phones. Usually its the more image heavy sites that suffer but thats understandable. Loading isnt too bad but when you're on a site that doesn't load up completely and start navigating, it will start to lag.
On the plus side its all very intuitive. Open up the Safari browser from the main screen and you're asked to input a web address. Touch the typing feild and the keyboard pops up with a conveniant new key thats absent from the keyboard when you're text messaging or writing a memo: it's a .COM key, how nice. Once on your desired site you'd do everything like you'd think you would..
Scrolling is done by sliding your fingers around the screen like a mouse, you can scroll in any direction and its very responsive, just try not to hit a link when choosing where on the screen to start sliding. If you're like me you might have trouble seeing all the text cuz its rather tiny for its screen, but its not like the Wii where the resolution makes everything look awkward. Its more like looking at your monitor from a few feet away. Now my eyes aren't bad, I don't need glasses, but it was much easier to just zoom in to read everything without having to hold the phone up to my eyes like an old man. My girlfriend who was with me and also playing with one said she didnt have to zoom in, so if your eyes are in supurb condition you won't always have to zoom. Also zooming in works like you'd think, all i did was tap the screen and went in for a closer look, but... it didnt always work. My first try was easy, but there were many times after it where I was under the impression you had to double tab.. sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.. but to be honest, im not sure exactly how you do it because non of the Apple Associates came by to lend a hand, I just kinda figured it out on my own. Maybe I wasn't doing it right so I won't blame that on the phone.
By the way, using the browser seemed much easier when the iPhone was held sideways (lengthewise, as if you're holding a ds) because you see more of the page your looking at and are in more of a ready position to type when you need to. Plus having both thumbs readily available to scroll in any direction is a plus. The Accelerometer seemed a bit tricky to use for some people.. they would tilt it and nothing happened. I had no problem with it the first time I turned it sideways or back to its upright "iPod" position. When I noticed even my girlfriend having trouble I played around with different positions to find out this: Most people hold their iPods straight up when looking at it, slightly tilted back. When they held it sideways they held in flat, so the screen was basically straight up. Thats when it didnt work for them.
When I did it the first time, I too was holding it upwards in my right hand, slightly tilted back, but i turned it straigh sideways at a 90 degree angle so the screen faced me for a split second before tilting it back that way, to lay it flat (screen up). I tried doing what everyone else was doing and thats when I couldnt get the accelerometer working either. I'll use WarioWare position names to make it easy to relate to: Picure someone holding the iPhone like a wiimote, with the face of the wiimote representing the screen. If you held the wiimote in the umbrella position and then tried turning it to the Handlebar position in one somoth motion; That won't work. Instead you'd want to go from an Umbrella to a Chaeuffer position to get the screen image to flip, from there you can lean it back like the Handlebar if you like. Make sense? I hope so. Moving on..
Video/Image Quality:First video I checked out was the
Dramatic Chipmunk on Youtube (which by the way, has a conveniant link of its own on the iPhones main menu screen). Loaded up pretty quick and the quality was just as good/bad as it is on youtube so thats not really good to review. Luckily it did come preloaded with video clips to check out. They had clips of movies like School of Rock and a musiv video for the Frey on there, and they all seemed crystal clear and easy on the eyes. Switching screen modes from upright to sideways (or widescreen if you want to call it that) didnt show any noticible changes to the quality either.
I didn't know the iPhone had a camera until I played with it. I'm not surprised, as it was only a matter of time before they released an iPod with a camera, and making it a camera phone makes sense since every phone is a camera now. The quality was the best I've seen on any cameraphone, though it lacks flash. If this affects picture taking in dimmer places is unkown to me because the apple store is so bright so testing that out wasn't possible.
Sound:Can't really say much abou adio quality because I didn't have headphones with me to plug in. Some of the iPhones were equipped with them but the only available one was previously used by a big sweaty guy.. I didnt want his sweat on me. I did however make a phone call to my gf whom I asked to walk around the store, quality seemed good. My only irk was the form of the phone, I'm used to flip-top phones and holding them slightly bent so that the reciever is closer to my mouth (I'm usually a soft speaker and also fairly private so I don't want to speak too loudly , so putting it closer works for me).
Random Stuff:It's about time I wrap this up, its gone on long enough. I'll mention here a few things i might have missed. Do note that my time with the iPhone was limited, played with it for maybe a half hour and since i didnt get any assistance with it, some of these issues might not really be issues at all once you know how to use everything to its fullest.
1. When typing, you cant switch from lower case to upper case. your first letter at the start of typing, or the first letter after a period is always uppercase though.
2. The browser is capable of bookmarking if anyone had a concern about it
3. when inputting text in certain fields (say logging into something and having to type your username/email and password) the keyboard operations change a bit. take the email/password example; you touch the input field to have it zoom in and bring up the keyboard. Above the keyboard is a "previous" and "next" button that basically works like the tab key, so you can switch feilds without having to click "done" and go back to the page and have to re-tap the second input feild. Makes it easier.
4. There were problems doing the input mentioned above. If the page wasnt fully loaded some errors would occur. when you tap the input field it might not display right so you'd have no idea what you were typing. Sometimes the typing would lag as well.
5. when scrolling thru websites (while zoomed in), sometimes you'd scroll too fast and a part of the page would be missing. It's a wierd checkerboard design thats like a place holder for the parts of the page that are off screen.. i dunno, thats the best i could explain it.
6. iPod functions are pretty easy. you have your normal search options like Artist, and Album, etc. Also when going down the list theres an alphabet on the side where you can tap a letter and jump to the album/artist of that letter. I've seen this feature on other mp3 players (Creative Zen players) but not ipod.
7. Newest feature to iPod browsing is by album covers. I wasnt sure how to do this right away as there is no button for it, turns out all you do is hold the iPhone sideways and you can scroll left/right thru covers like a jukebox.
8. You'd think going back to the main menu be something you control via the touch screen but its not. Took me a few minutes to realize it wasnt. The small button below the touchscreen, with a square on it, is what takes you back. i thought that was power button.
Totally not worth it unless you need the status symbol or need an all in one device. I'd rather wait till they come up with something with a bigger hard drive (4/8 gb? please..) and offer other networks (most of everyone i know is on tmobile so its convenient to stick with it) and has better service plans (cheapest plan: $60 for 450 daytime min, 5000 night and weekend, and 200 text messages.. the iPod crowd of younger kids will text way more than that. for the same price i get 15000 minutes and unlimited text) and of course better battery life.. the battery times that apple has on their site seem like a good thing but i know if i had this all-in-one device i'd drain that battery so fast...
Topic: Iphone (Read 26417 times)
