iPhone 3G review
An iPhone 3G review
By Bob.
I’d like to preface this by saying that I am not an Apple fanboy. I don’t own a Mac (I have a homemade PC with Vista on it) and I’ve never owned an iPod (I have a Zune and before that, a Dell DJ), so the concept of buying an Apple cell phone is a bit odd for me. However, I don’t have any allegiance to any specific cellphone makers – I just want the best cell phone for me.
For 9 months I debated between Symbian phones, Windows Mobile phones, the Blackberry line (specifically the as-of-yet-released Bold) and finally the iPhone. I pared it down to the BlackBerry or the iPhone, so the obsessing process began.
When the iPhone was first released in 2007, I was stuck in a contract on Sprint that still had a year left, so I watched the iPhone launch from afar. I spent the next year (until last week) watching the iPhone as well as the Blackberry line, seeing what was happening and trying to make an informed decision. Who knew it would be one of the toughest decisions I’d ever have to make when trying to decide what cellphone to buy.
In that year period, I watched Apple tweak the iPhone 2G, release the iPhone 3G, release several software updates and watched RIM do nothing with the BlackBerry Bold except announce that it was coming. As of this writing, the Bold is rumored to be out on 10-2-08, but nothing official has come down the pike.
I watched countless YouTube videos and read countless videos on both phones, read a number of forums on Crackberry.com, Howard Forums, plus the usual tech sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, trying to make the right choice.
Both phones will do exactly what I need it to do, but the way that both phones go about it are completely different, so I had to figure out which one was going to be the best for me.
In the end, the deciding factor for me was bringing home an iPod Touch for a weekend and testing it out. My wife and I sat on the couch and passed it back and forth for hours, just playing with the different features, learning how to type on the glass screen and surfing the internet, trying to figure out if the phone was for us, or just a fad that’d grow old faster.
We decided that night to get iPhones and then the wait began until September 9th, 2008: iPhone 3G day.
I had ordered 2 16gb iPhone 3G’s from the AT&T store on a suggestion from the AT&T rep. He said that although they had them in stock (this was a week before we could actually use them), they were the “hot thing” and they might not be in stock when we came back, so I ordered 2 of them on my credit card and they were waiting for us the night we went in to sign our new 2 year contracts.
The rep powered them on and got the SIM cards ready, but warned us that it’d take awhile for the number porting process to fully take place, plus there was an AT&T network problem that was causing phones to not work for a bit. His suggestion was to power the phone on every 30 minutes until it worked and about 2 hours later, our phones were connecting to AT&T’s network and we could place calls, but could not receive them, thanks to Sprint taking their sweet time. This would continue on for a full 24 hours and then, after a phone call to AT&T’s porting department, we were 100% ready to go.
Hardware
The iPhone 3G itself is a gorgeous piece of technology, with only one visible button on the front (the “Home” button), 2 on the left side (volume up/down toggle and silent switch) and one on the top, a Sleep/lock button. The bottom has the Apple proprietary jack and the top has the flush headphone jack. This was a nice change from the iPhone 2G, where the headphone jack was recessed, causing users that had L-plug headphones to buy an adapter to use their headphones with the iPhone.
The back of the iPhone 3G is black (or white if you so choose that model) and made of plastic. This is so the various cell signals inside the phone (3G, GPS, Wifi and BlueTooth) can get through the phone easier. The iPhone 2G had a metal back and a small plastic area at the bottom of the phone where the antenna was housed. This caused many issues for users, so the plastic backing on the iPhone 3G was well received, although some users worry that the plastic backing won’t stand up to drops and scratches like the iPhone 2G. While this may be a problem for some users, the first thing I did was purchase a case, specifically the SwitchEasy “CapsuleRebel” case for $30. Since there is no insurance available for the iPhone 3G, I was going to protect the phone as much as humanly possible.
Screen
The iPhone 3G is outfitted with a glass 3.5 inch touch-based screen with a 480×320 resolution. You can watch movies and TV shows with relative ease on it, as well as view album covers on the whole screen when in iPod mode, or when using music applications such as Pandora.
While the screen is a fingerprint magnet, I have found that I prefer it “naked” as opposed to having a screen on it. This is for several reasons. 1, they’re a pain in the butt to put on perfectly. 2, there’s always lint or dust that gets trapped underneath the screen and that bugs me more than a few fingerprints do and 3, I didn’t want to risk losing any sensitivity with the touchscreen. Since the screen is made of glass, it can put up with a lot of abuse, within limits, and still function perfectly fine.
A lot of people are split on “hardware keyboards”, like the BlackBerry, versus a “software keyboard”, like the iPhone has. This is one of those things that I believe needs to be experienced for more than a 10 minute demo at the Apple Store. At first, I was worried about this very fact as well, but liking the concept that the keyboard is only onscreen when it needs to be and not just wasting valuable space when I want to do other things, like view a website, look at an e-mail or just interface with the phone in general.
After spending a day with the iPhone, I have to say that it’s not as bad as people think. I’m still getting used to the phone and for some reason my right thumb is always one letter off to the right, but the cool thing about the software keyboard is that when you tap on a letter, a bigger version of that letter pops up to notify you which button you’re trying to press. If you keep your finger on the screen and slide it around, you’ll move from letter to letter. When you arrive at the letter you want, simple lift your finger off the screen and that letter will be typed out.
When starting to type a word, Apple has included an intelligent spellchecker that tries to help you spell out the word automatically, so you don’t have to type out the whole word. When the word appears that you want to use, press the spacebar to accept it. If it’s not the word you want, you can click X on the word bubble and it’ll keep the word you typed. Eventually if you do this enough, the software “learns” the words you want to type and typing should become easier. You can also press the spacebar twice and it’ll automatically add a period and a space for your next sentence. Very handy.
Typing
You can also enable Caps Lock in the Keyboard options menu and then activate it by quickly pressing the Shift key twice. It’ll turn blue to notify you that it’s enabled. To exit Caps Lock, simply tap Shift again.
Caps Lock
Software
I’m sure most of the people that read this site are already familiar with how to interface with the iPhone. To use the iPhone, simply tap on any icon to launch that program and then use your finger to interface with the application. If you want to exit the app you’re in and return to the main screen, just click the button at the bottom of the phone. That immediately exits the app and returns you home. If you’re in an e-mail, note or on a Safari website and click the Home button, when you return to that specific app it will remember where you were at and you can continue from there.
Home Screen
It is true that you cannot multitask on the iPhone like you can on the BlackBerry, but I have found this to be a non-issue. Considering that I came from a plain flip-phone before the iPhone, I can do worlds more now than ever before.
If I had one complaint, it’s that you can’t use Instant Messaging services in the background (when running another application), but Apple is working on this technology, so I’m hoping that sooner rather than later, this problem will be addressed.
One of the newer updates to the iPhone, as of the 2.0 software update, is the ability to have Exchange mail support in the e-mail client. This means that any business that has Microsoft Exchange e-mail support can have that mailbox synced with the iPhone.
When you have the iPhone locked and hit either the Home or Sleep button, you can see if you have any missed calls or text messages. You cannot, however, see if you have any e-mails waiting for you, even just by number. The only way to see if you have any mail waiting for you is to unlock the phone and check the screen yourself. This is probably my biggest negative to the phone. I keep my iPhone in my home office when I sleep at night and I check it in the morning. Since there’s no status light on the front of the phone to notify me if I missed anything, I have to wake the phone and check manually, but since I can’t just tap a button and view the screen to see everything I might have missed, it’s a bit of a pain to unlock the phone just to check to see if I have any e-mails waiting. I saw a patent recently filed by Apple that may fix this problem, but as of right now, there’s nothing announced.
iTunes and the iPhone
To interface with the iPhone, you must use iTunes. As of this review, the latest version is iTunes 8, which you must use if you want to download and install the 2.1 update that was released on September 12th.
When you plug the iPhone (via the included proprietary sync cable) into your PC, it will automatically launch iTunes. You will see the iPhone in the middle of the left pane under Devices. At the top of the right pane is access to all the information about your iPhone that you need to know:
Summary: What version of the software you have, as well as some options for when the iPhone is plugged into your phone.
Info: Sync options for MobileMe, Contacts, Calendars, Mail Accounts, Web Browser and some extra advanced options.
Ringtones: Sync options for all the ringtones on your PC, or only specific ones.
Music: When you have playlists that you want to sync, you must sync them from this menu. You can choose to sync everything or just playlists from this menu as well. This is a bit different than how I used to sync my wife’s iPod, but I like the way it works now. All checkmarked playlists are synced to the iPhone and anything not checked is not synced. This threw me off at first, because I did one at a time and the iPhone would only have the last playlist synced, but once I had the ones I wanted checkmarked, they all appeared on the iPhone just fine.
Photos: Similar to Ringtones, you can sync all your photos or only selected ones via this tab.
Podcasts: Your podcast syncing options are listed here.
Video: This tab allows you to set sync options for your Rented Movies, TV Shows and Movies.
Applications: Similar to Podcasts, Photos and Ringtones, you can set how your Applications are synced: All of them or specific ones.
There are alternate options to sync the iPhone if you don’t want to use iTunes, such as WinAmp and MediaMonkey, but I prefer to use the iPhone since it helps control all facets of my iPhone in one place.
Applications
There are 18 icons on the phone by default and only a few that I really don’t care for or use on a regular basis. Stocks and Clock haven’t ever been used on this phone, but I’m sure there are other people that use those all the time, so I just moved them to a second “page” and never touch them. You can have up to 9 pages of icons, so there’s plenty of room for everyone to put their favorite (and not so favorite icons) wherever they want.
Second page of icons
One of the features of the iPhone that I do like, at least with Applications that you can download and install, is uninstall them directly from the page the icon is on. When you hold any icon down for several seconds, all the icons start to wiggle. This feature allows you to move icons into the bottom “dashboard” (icons that are always onscreen regardless of what page you’re on), as well as move icons to other pages and in any order on the page you’re on. While the icons are wiggling, you’ll notice that the icons that are programs you downloaded from AppStore have a red X in the top right corner. Clicking on that icon will allow you to uninstall the program from the iPhone.
Something I wish for in a future software update: The ability to uninstall programs that are on the iPhone by default. If I know for a fact that I’ll never use the Stock application, I’d love the ability to be able to either delete the program from the iPhone (with the option to reinstall it via iTunes), or Hide the icon like you can do on a BlackBerry. That way, even though the program is still on the phone, it’s not visible and I can install other icons that I will use, but still access it if I wanted to by un-hiding the icons. Not a dealbreaker by any means, but a nice feature to think about in the future.
Speaking of 3rd party applications, you can only download and install these via a program called AppStore. AppStore allows you to purchase and download applications directly to the iPhone. You can do this over WIFI or 3G.
When you launch AppStore, you have 5 buttons along the bottom of the phone: Featured, Categories, Top 25, Search and Updates. Updates will tell you when you have an update to any installed apps on your iPhone, but you have to run AppStore to use this feature – it will not fetch the data for you.
To download an app from AppStore, all you have to do is tap on the name of the app you want, then follow the prompts. It’s that simple.
You can also download apps via iTunes if you want. Some people have said that it works better for backup purposes if you use iTunes rather than the AppStore app on the iPhone, but I haven’t really found a difference either way. Your mileage may vary.
I have always maintained that the AppStore feature is the most unique feature ever put on a phone and it’s one of the iPhone’s biggest selling points: The ability to download any app you want, at any time. This worked fantastic for iTunes and now it’s extended to AppStore.
So far the only 3 apps I’ve downloaded are Pandora, Twitteriffic and AirShare. When I loaded the AppStore for this review, AppStore automatically notified me that I had 2 updates and I downloaded them both with no issues, so now all my apps are completely up to date.
With the iPhone, you can purchase and download music directly to the iPhone over WIFI only. When you launch iTunes, there are four icons at the bottom: Features, Top Tens, Search and Downloads. Similar to AppStore, when you find a song you want, simply tap on the song and follow the prompts. Getting music on the iPhone is a very easy process and “just works”, similar to the AppStore apps.
One feature of the iTunes app on the iPhone that I really like is if you tap on any song, you can listen to a 30 second snippet of it before deciding if you want to purchase it or not, just like you can do on the PC version of iTunes. Once you have made up your mind and want to purchase the song on your phone, simply click on the button on the right and follow the prompts. When you sync your iPhone with iTunes, iTunes will automatically back up the song to your computer. Very handy.
Battery
One of my biggest debates between the iPhone and the BlackBerry (as well as just about every other smartphone out there) is that the iPhone does not have a removable battery. Apple claims that the iPhone’s battery can handle around 400 charges and will still keep around 80% of its original battery life. That’s fine and dandy, but what about after 400 charges? After a year and a half or 2 years, the battery will start to lose its charge and I’ll have to worry about the possibility of getting a replacement battery. Since it’s not user replaceable, you have to send it in to Apple to have it replaced… for an $80 charge. On top of that, they wipe your phone, so you’ll have to restore it when you get the phone back, approximately a week later.
Looking closely on the bottom of the iPhone 3G, there are two visible screws, so I’m assuming that taking the battery out won’t be as hard as it was on the iPhone 2G, but if you do this, you obviously void the iPhone’s warranty. If you could have this repair done at the Genius Bar in an Apple store, that would be quite the relief, but as far as I’m aware as of this review, that’s not possible: you must send your phone in to Apple to have the battery replaced.
My actual battery life isn’t as good as most other smartphones on the market are. I get approximately 24 to 30 hours between charges. There is a handy Usage option in the Settings of the iPhone, so you can see how much you’ve used the phone since its last charge, but that’s also heartbreaking to see in print how little use it takes before the juice runs out and the phone must be recharged.
The iPhone comes with a sync cable so you can plug your phone into your PC and charge the phone, plus it comes with a handy wall socket usb adapter, so you can plug the sync cable into it, then into a wall socket and charge the phone much faster than via the PC. I’ve found that from a completely dead phone to a full charge via wall socket, it’s around 2 hours. Via PC charge, it’s around 2.5 to 3 hours. Not bad at all. I also purchased a car charger for $25, but I have yet to use it. It’s a Griffin PowerJolt SE and it also charges regular iPods as well. This charger has a light ring that glows red, amber or green, so you know its status. That’s very cool and much better than my last phone’s charger that always glowed red, regardless of its charging status.
The biggest drawback for me is not the short battery life… it’s the lack of removable battery. I hope that Apple eventually gives the iPhone one, but that does sacrifice the smooth lines of the iPhone. I’d gladly sacrifice the smooth lines to have a removable battery. I have my phone in a case, afterall… I’m not worried about the smooth back on the phone.
Final Thoughts
Since the iPhone has been announced (and subsequently released), it’s been a competitor to the BlackBerry in the business and consumer space. Since the iPhone is a consumer phone first, obviously it’s in the hands of more consumers than business professionals, but now that you can sync Exchange e-mail accounts, businesses have taken notice.
There are more things about the iPhone that I like than dislike, so I’m definitely glad I got the device. Although I do wish I had more “power user” options, overall, for Apple’s second-ever cell phone, I’m pretty happy.
My major nitpicks are the lack of a status light, non-replaceable battery and the proprietary sync plug, rather than a USB plug. Everything else I can deal with.
Here’s hoping Apple continues to make the iPhone a formidable smartphone in this very competitive cell phone market.
8 / 10
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