Digital Trends

Apple iPhone (4GB) July 3rd, 2007 | by Stewart Wolpin

Features and Design

As one has come to expect from Apple, the metal iPhone features a minimalist design. At 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches, it feels smooth and cool to the touch, and at 4.8 ounces, if feels hefty rather than heavy. There are a few minimalist and unlabeled buttons --a ringer on-off switch and a voice toggle on the left and, up top, the SIM card tray and the 3.5mm earphone jack. On the bottom is the familiar 30-pin iPod connector bracketed by twin speakers.

Covering the front of the unit is a 3.5-inch glass touchscreen that fades the black to create a blended mirror surface. Above the screen is the slit earpiece, below is the concave home button.

Once activated through iTunes (if you're transferring what AT&T defines as a "business" account, including a Blackberry plan, you may have to call them to manually switch you), you load up your iPhone with songs, video, photos and Podcasts as per usual.

But of course, iPhone is more than a fancy iPod. On the bottom of the home screen are icons for iPhone's four major functions: phone, mail, Safari Web browser and iPod. Above these are iPhone's widgets, 12 additional handy functions: SMS text messaging, calendar, photos, camera, YouTube, stocks, Google Maps, weather, clock, calculator, notes and settings. Of these, nothing is as endearing as the endlessly addictive and travel-time filling YouTube widget. Almost as additive is Google Maps. You can zoom in from satellite view anywhere in the world, then click on "Map" to see a road map of the area you zoomed in on.

Everything is controlled by a complete version of Mac OS X, not a limited mobile-only operating system. With the full Mac OS X, expect additional expansive applications down the road.

The phone function has five major options: favorite contacts, recent calls, contacts, keypad and voicemail. Contact lists and calendars can be synced from Apple's Address Book and iCal programs, Entourage and Microsoft Outlook can be synced as well. The prize here is the random access voicemail, called Visual Voicemail. Instead of audibly weeding your way linearly through a series of unknown callers, messages are listed. You simply tap on the message you want to hear. Why no one thought of this before is amazing and it's sure to be copied.

You can customize your iPhone to receive full HTML email -- all fonts, graphics and pictures included, just like on your desktop PC -- from your standard POP3 address, a corporate IMAP or Microsoft Exchange server, or from AOL, Gmail and Yahoo! push email. Only the handful of Windows Mobile 6 smartphones can receive full HTML email. You also can open any Microsoft Office or PDF attachment. There is no Blackberry Connect -- yet. You can set iPhone to check your mail automatically in given time intervals or manually collect it when you want, but there are no synchronization or reconciliation options familiar to Blackberry and Microsoft Exchange users.

Another iPhone innovation is the Web browser. Like the OS, it's the complete Safari browser, not a crippled mobile browser. The only downfall is that it doesn't support Flash -- yet.

iPhone comes with a docking cradle with a stereo line out in the rear and a pair of familiar white iPod earphones but with a slim in-line mic added to the right earpiece cable. Simply squeezing the microphone while the iPhone is ringing will answer the call, another squeeze will end the call - it works like a charm.

For some reason, Apple sank the 3.5mm jack on the iPhone so no other normal stereo earphones will fit, which is infuriating to those who'd rather use higher quality 'phones. With its Upgrader series UHS306 ($89.95 USD) and UHS307 ($59.95 USD), Altec Lansing is the first of what promises to be several earphone makers with iPhone compatible models. If you want to use your own headphones, Shure's 35-inch Music Phone Adapter ($39.99 USD), due in August, includes an in-line mic for audiophile conversation, while Belkin's stub Headphone Adapter ($10.95 USD) is for listening only.

There's also only mono Bluetooth, no stereo Bluetooth. No stereo Bluetooth means more robust music listening battery life. We're also betting that Apple is waiting for implementation of the new Bluetooth Simple Pairing protocol that will eliminate a lot of the logistical wireless connectivity headaches.

No other smartphone has as much built-in memory as the iPhone's 8 GB, but this could turn out to be a drawback. For one thing, there's no external memory card slot to expand your storage space. So between your music, photos, video and PodCasts that are iPod-easy to load, you'll fill that 8 GB (actually around 7.2 GB since Mac OS X takes up a chunk of space) on your first sync. We wish there were a Shuffle-like autofill option for those of us with more than a couple of thousand AAC tracks in our collection.

Image Courtesy of Apple