Digital Trends

Apple iPhone (8GB) July 3rd, 2007 | by Stewart Wolpin

Testing and Use

iPhone's innovations with the touchscreen and OS are more than the sum of its parts. Unlike any other mobile device, iPhone is flat out fun to use, regardless of how mundane the function.

First and foremost, everything on iPhone is accessed by the most fluid, responsive and downright spooky touchscreen you've ever encountered. And manipulating iPhone apps and functions sounds more complicated than it is. Tap an icon and it immediately expands and loads its function. Flick to scroll. Spread thumb and forefinger or double-tap to zoom, single finger to move around an on-screen document, pinch to decrease the size. After just a few minutes, you'll tap, flick and pinch as naturally as breathing. Pushing buttons will suddenly seem as anachronistic as a dial telephone.

And iPhone eerily reacts as if you were touching something real. When you flick to scroll through a list it's like spinning a wheel; it moves quickly at first then slows down gradually just like a real wheel. It's as if the iPhone is actually alive.

But the screen is even smarter when you're not activating functions. When iPhone senses you're swinging it up to your ear for a call, it deactivates the touchscreen. When you swing it back down, it knows the call is over and automatically reactivates the screen so you can tap "End Call." When you twist the phone from its natural vertical orientation to horizontal, photos, video and Web pages go widescreen and automatically fill the screen. And if you need to wipe away fingerprints, iPhone doesn't skip a beat.

Equally intelligent is the predictive text behind the keyboard, the best we've seen. You won't need it for Web addresses because you get a widescreen keypad that limits errors. But the email keypad appears only on the bottom half of the screen in landscape mode, and numbers and frequently used punctuation are annoyingly are on a second screen. You will miss-hit the keys, but as long as you don't severely mangle the first few letters of a word, iPhone seems to know what you wanted to type. Just hit the space bar when the word you're looking for appears. Repetitive typing will result in faster composition and fewer mistakes. But even experience and the superior predictive text is still no match for a good thumbpad.

iPhone's iPod is an improvement in some ways, but a step back in others. With a bigger screen, there's room for all your track segmentation options. Album covers or other photos appear full screen while music playing. Pushing a list icon flips the album cover over to reveal other tracks by that and, sometimes, other similar artists. In order to pause a song, all you need to do is click the in-line mic on the earbuds, and the iPhone will pause your music.

Videos and photos have remarkable high-def-like resolution. Movie aspect ratios are also adjustable. We could watch Gallipoli in full frame widescreen or letterboxed within the iPhone's widescreen in the film's original Panavision 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

iPhone's no frills 2 MP camera -- no video, no flash, no zoom, no choice of resolutions -- takes crisp, clear shots. And the 3.5-inch screen is the largest camera screen extant.

Image Courtesy of Apple