iPhone - Official Thread

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Gary Whitta said:
Why would you want the iPhone without the data plan anyway?
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If you are often around a wi-fi source there's almost no need for EDGE... until you get lost in an area without coverage and need Google Maps...
 
border said:
Which is to say I can't download podcasts on-the-go? I guess I'll pass on this and wait for Rev2 then.
What about internet radio? Shouldn't it at least be possible to listen to it over the AT&T Cingular network? Or would you have to point the browser to a website that has an embedded Flash/Javascript player?
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It may be possible to listen and view podcasts on the go without having to sync them first. A leaked document from WWDC about what the Safari browser can do said that it can progressivly download and play back quicktime compatible media clips stored on web servers.

It said that Flash is NOT supported nor is true Quicktime streaming but the kinds of clips stored on web servers and delivered using podcast feeds may work. Don't expect to be able to store them. Just listen to them from the beginning on demand like you do with a web browser. If that document it true, you may be able to visit a website or feed url of a podcast and listen to it on the go over wifi.
 
SuperPac said:
I'm sure the lack of AIM/etc. is not going to hurt sales of the phone at all. I haven't seen any data, but I'd be surprised if the number of people who use AIM/Googletalk, etc. on their phones is very large compared to the number who Text.
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I never send text messages, but I do use AIM quite often so AIM support is pretty important to me where as I could care less if they give me 10,000 or 10 text messages.
 
Gary Whitta said:
What's this I'm hearing now that the iPhone has no vibration feature? That's weird.
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It does. They haven't demonstrated it, but the settings menu shown in the Guided Tour video clearly shows "vibrate."
 
they need a mobile itunes. How can you have an ipod, connected to the internet, and not be able to download podcasts directly?
 
mrklaw said:
they need a mobile itunes. How can you have an ipod, connected to the internet, and not be able to download podcasts directly?
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There're probably about a half-dozen-plus "how can you have a phone without [BLANK]" with the iPhone. These either matter to you and you won't buy or they don't matter and you will. What's the list look like...

- 3G
- IM client
- Flash support
- Mobile iTunes Store
- MMS (picture messaging)
- Custom/purchased ringtones
- GPS

etc. I'm sure others can continue the list.
 
StrikerObi said:
Really, you could at least read one post in the tread. The post DIRECTLY ABOVE YOURS talks about how you can't do that.
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eh? that post talks about podcasts :lol

Sorry, I wasn't really planing on getting one but everyone else at my company is so I am alittle behind the hype :P
 
SuperPac said:
There're probably about a half-dozen-plus "how can you have a phone without [BLANK]" with the iPhone. These either matter to you and you won't buy or they don't matter and you will. What's the list look like...

- 3G
- IM client
- Flash support
- Mobile iTunes Store
- MMS (picture messaging)
- Custom/purchased ringtones
- GPS

etc. I'm sure others can continue the list.
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I guess. I watched the 20 minute video and it looks really flash, but I can't help thinking they showed you the cool shallow stuff that the interface is good for. Hard to know how much power there is under the hood to do more complex things. Or even simple things like download stuff.

We'll know soon enough when the world and his dog gets one this week and starts posting about it.

Can we have a separate iphone impressions thread BTW? This one is getting a bit long.
 
OH NOES [URL="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118289311361649057.html.html?mod=technology_main_promo_left]Walt Mossber review sez iPhone doomed[/URL]
 
PJ-AK476_pjMOSS_20070626175028.gif
 
So the Mossberg review is basically... it's a completely consumer device, lacks hardcore business features, with some hassle in the interface because it doesn't have hardware buttons, and might suck 'cuz AT&T's reception ain't so great. But it's still a breakthrough and a pleasure to use. Hm. Still buying, but I'll be pretty pissed if AT&T's service sucks in my area. :'( (I looked for info on that elsewhere on the 'Net but it's pretty inconclusive...a lot of people say Sprint's service sucks where I live. I have Sprint and I haven't had any reception problems.)

NYT Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/t...1182895890-m2yYGaQuzXLdm1ZcCLu6fw&oref=slogin
 
Chittagong said:
OH NOES [URL="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118289311361649057.html.html?mod=technology_main_promo_left]Walt Mossber review sez iPhone doomed[/URL]
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:lol

I pretty much find it impossible to see any real negative comments. In fact, they're more glowing than I could have expected. Given the non-Windows heritage, it's ability to move into most corporate installations is expected. The only real gripe seems to be about the speed of the network.

I was expecting folks to tee off a lot more. I guess I'll have to wait for Pogue.

WSJ said:
We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.

The Apple phone combines intelligent voice calling, and a full-blown iPod, with a beautiful new interface for music and video playback. It offers the best Web browser we have seen on a smart phone, and robust email software. And it synchronizes easily and well with both Windows and Macintosh computers using Apple's iTunes software.

It has the largest and highest-resolution screen of any smart phone we've seen, and the most internal memory by far. Yet it is one of the thinnest smart phones available and offers impressive battery life, better than its key competitors claim.

It feels solid and comfortable in the hand and the way it displays photos, videos and Web pages on its gorgeous screen makes other smart phones look primitive.

The iPhone's most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt -- who did most of the testing for this review -- was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.

...

Missing features: The iPhone is missing some features common on some competitors. There's no instant messaging, only standard text messaging. While its two-megapixel camera took excellent pictures in our tests, it can't record video. Its otherwise excellent Web browser can't fully utilize some Web sites, because it doesn't yet support Adobe's Flash technology. Although the phone contains a complete iPod, you can't use your songs as ringtones. There aren't any games, nor is there any way to directly access Apple's iTunes Music Store.

Apple says it plans to add features to the phone over time, via free downloads, and hints that some of these holes may be filled.

Expectations for the iPhone have been so high that it can't possibly meet them all. It isn't for the average person who just wants a cheap, small phone for calling and texting. But, despite its network limitations, the iPhone is a whole new experience and a pleasure to use.
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SuperPac said:
NYT Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/t...1182895890-m2yYGaQuzXLdm1ZcCLu6fw&oref=slogin
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Pogue is positive? It must be the end of the world.

Pogue said:
...

As it turns out, much of the hype and some of the criticisms are justified. The iPhone is revolutionary; it’s flawed. It’s substance; it’s style. It does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones.

...

The $500 and $600 models have 4 and 8 gigabytes of storage, respectively — room for about 825 or 1,825 songs. (In each case, 700 megabytes is occupied by the phone’s software.) That’s a lot of money; then again, the price includes a cellphone, video iPod, e-mail terminal, Web browser, camera, alarm clock, Palm-type organizer and one heck of a status symbol.

The phone is so sleek and thin, it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese. The glass gets smudgy—a sleeve wipes it clean—but it doesn’t scratch easily. I’ve walked around with an iPhone in my pocket for two weeks, naked and unprotected (the iPhone, that is, not me), and there’s not a mark on it.

But the bigger achievement is the software. It’s fast, beautiful, menu-free, and dead simple to operate. You can’t get lost, because the solitary physical button below the screen always opens the Home page, arrayed with icons for the iPhone’s 16 functions.

...

Making a call, though, can take as many as six steps: wake the phone, unlock its buttons, summon the Home screen, open the Phone program, view the Recent Calls or speed-dial list, and select a name. Call quality is only average, and depends on the strength of your AT&T signal.

E-mail is fantastic. Incoming messages are fully formatted, complete with graphics; you can even open (but not edit) Word, Excel and PDF documents.

The Web browser, though, is the real dazzler. This isn’t some stripped-down, claustrophobic My First Cellphone Browser; you get full Web layouts, fonts and all, shrunk to fit the screen. You scroll with a fingertip —much faster than scroll bars. You can double-tap to enlarge a block of text for reading, or rotate the screen 90 degrees, which rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view.

...

So yes, the iPhone is amazing. But no, it’s not perfect.
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sonycowboy said:
Pogue is positive? It must be the end of the world.
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In the article he also says that the NYTimes homepage took almost a minute to show up with Edge, other websites even longer.
 
Is anyone really surprised by the speed of Edge? I remember everyone saying Edge would be too slow back in the MacWorld thread from January, fifteen minutes after they announced it. All I can say is, I'm glad I have good Wifi coverage.
 
capslock said:
In the article he also says that the NYTimes homepage took almost a minute to show up with Edge, other websites even longer.
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Oops. Missed page 2 ;)

There’s no memory-card slot, no chat program, no voice dialing. You can’t install new programs from anyone but Apple; other companies can create only iPhone-tailored mini-programs on the Web. The browser can’t handle Java or Flash, which deprives you of millions of Web videos.

...

Then there’s the small matter of typing. Tapping the skinny little virtual keys on the screen is frustrating, especially at first.

...

Even so, text entry is not the iPhone’s strong suit. The BlackBerry won’t be going away anytime soon.

The bigger problem is the AT&T network. In a Consumer Reports study, AT&T’s signal ranked either last or second to last in 19 out of 20 major cities. My tests in five states bear this out. If Verizon’s slogan is, “Can you hear me now?” AT&T’s should be, “I’m losing you.”

Then there’s the Internet problem. When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, going online is fast and satisfying.

But otherwise, you have to use AT&T’s ancient EDGE cellular network, which is excruciatingly slow. The New York Times’s home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo, two minutes. You almost ache for a dial-up modem.

These drawbacks may be deal-killers for some people. On the other hand, both the iPhone and its network will improve. Apple points out that unlike other cellphones, this one can and will be enhanced with free software updates. That’s good, because I encountered a couple of tiny bugs and one freeze. (There’s also a tantalizing empty space for a row of new icons on the Home screen.) A future iPhone model will be able to exploit AT&T’s newer, much faster data network, which is now available in 160 cities.

But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles.
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Wow, those two reviews (from two of the biggest names in tech reviews) are both pretty glowing. Looks like the keyboard really does work once you get the hang of it. The EDGE results are bad news, but totally expected at least. If I get one I'm sure to be in wi-fi areas most of the time so it's not that big of a deal breaker for me. Still, I'm waiting out for iPhone Revision A. First run Apple products are doomed, and I don't have the money right now.
 
sonycowboy said:
Pogue is positive? It must be the end of the world.
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Is he usually not?

I do kinda agree that it's too many steps to make a call. My current phone is flip phone open, dial number (or push and hold to speed-dial). I thought Apple was about SIMPLIFYING, man. Not making-more-difficult. Push sleep wake, unlock, bring up home, press phone...I'm already ZZzzz... But, the nice thing is that they can fix SOME of this through software updates. Unlike, as Steve said during the MWSF Keynote, other phones where you're locked to the number of buttons and interface. So I guess that's good. I'm sure they'll be tweaking quite a bit.

Newsweek's Steven Levy's review
 
SuperPac said:
Is he usually not?

I do kinda agree that it's too many steps to make a call. My current phone is flip phone open, dial number (or push and hold to speed-dial). I thought Apple was about SIMPLIFYING, man. Not making-more-difficult. Push sleep wake, unlock, bring up home, press phone...I'm already ZZzzz... But, the nice thing is that they can fix SOME of this through software updates. Unlike, as Steve said during the MWSF Keynote, other phones where you're locked to the number of buttons and interface. So I guess that's good. I'm sure they'll be tweaking quite a bit.

Newsweek's Steven Levy's review
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Good thing what you mentioned takes like 4 seconds. I mean, how much more streamlined can they make it?
 
Just wow, that little machine is sick! Just watched the video review from NYT, and eventhough it doesn't offer something revolutionary new, it delivers it sooo sooo well. The UI is just stunning!

Thank god I live in Europe, so I can't get tempted to much by it.
 
SuperPac said:
Newsweek's Steven Levy's review
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That’s one reason why people, especially the tens of millions who love iPods, have been so eagerly awaiting the iPhone. “Everyone we talk to hates their phones—it’s universal,” Steve Jobs told me on a call to my iPhone a couple of days ago. (The control-freaky Apple CEO was just checking up to see how I was doing.)

But the bottom line is that the iPhone is a significant leap. It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding. The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge.

...

Bottom line: In a sense, the iPhone has already made its mark. Even those who never buy one will benefit from its advances, as competitors have already taken Apple’s achievements as a wake-up call to improve their own products. But for all its virtues, the iPhone is still a risky venture because it’s yet to be proven that, despite the wow factor, millions of people are ready to pay several hundred dollars more than the going rate for phones—and in some cases, paying even more to bail out of their current mobile contracts. There’s also a potential backlash from those sick of the hype. During our iPhone conversation, however, Jobs professed that he wasn’t concerned about inflated hopes, and certainly not whether he would meet his own projections of 10 million sold in 2008: “I think we’re going to blow away the expectations.”

Certainly all those people lining up to buy iPhones will find their investment worthwhile, if only for the delight they get from dazzling their friends. They will surely appreciate the iPhone’s features and the way they are intertwined to present a unified experience. But in the future—when the iPhone has more applications and offers more performance, with a lower price—buyers will find even more value. So smart consumers may well wait for that day. But meanwhile they can only look with envy as the person sitting next to them to them on the subway, or standing ahead of them in the Whole Foods line, is enjoying the phone that finally fulfills the promise of people-friendly palm-top communication and computing.
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Urge rising. Wife likely to kill me. The slowness of the EDGE network is disappointing, but everything else seems fantastic. Better than I expected as I thought the JESUS phone stuff was going too far.
 
sonycowboy said:
Urge rising. Wife likely to kill me. The slowness of the EDGE network is disappointing, but everything else seems fantastic. Better than I expected as I thought the JESUS phone stuff was going too far.
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Edge is looking like more and more a deal breaker for me, and we have not heard apple say a thing about the built in camera. Looks like I will be waiting for next years model. In any case, I originally planned to use my N73 for 2 years, that should be around Dec. 2008.
 
No worries, I'm sure major sites will just tune their pages to load faster on the iPhone. A whole second world wide web will basically appear to support it.
 
There have been talks of AT&T doing some things to streamline their EDGE network and beef it up in areas. Plus, I think there will be some updates to the browser to help with the speed some too, but I have to admit that the reviews are taking some of the luster of the iPhone because of the shitty performance on the EDGE network. The rest of the package sounds so good that I'll probably still be in love with the phone, but it does sound like it's very slow.
 
As of now I'm contract free!

but whoa 60 bucks a month? Holy shit even my Verizon plan sounds better than that. Eh...too much money for a touchpad phone and iPod, although if they make that kind of design for the next iPod I'm down.
 
Christopher said:
As of now I'm contract free!

but whoa 60 bucks a month? Holy shit even my Verizon plan sounds better than that. Eh...too much money for a touchpad phone and iPod, although if they make that kind of design for the next iPod I'm down.
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What Verizon plan did you have that gave you unlimited data, 200 text messages and voice minutes at a better rate? I have Verizon now, and one of the things that I don't like about them is how they charge you for every single thing. For instance, if you want GPS navigation, it's a monthly fee.
 
I don't know a lot about EDGE, but can someone tell me just how slow it gets? If I wanted to browse NeoGAF on the thing, would it be unbearable?
 
cvxfreak said:
I don't know a lot about EDGE, but can someone tell me just how slow it gets? If I wanted to browse NeoGAF on the thing, would it be unbearable?
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Well, as a starting point, take these times as reported from their iPhone experience:

"The New York Times’s home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo, two minutes"

and extrapolate from there based on how long it takes these and GAF to load for you on your PC. Seems like it'd be pretty painful, depending on how quickly you tend to hop from topic to topic.
 
Shogmaster said:
Nyuck nyuck
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Luckily, most of the reviews seem to say that smudging's not an issue. I dunno how it wouldn't be, but I'm gonna find out anyway Friday. Unless getting to an Apple Store around 6 means not getting the phone. Then I order online.
 
cvxfreak said:
I don't know a lot about EDGE, but can someone tell me just how slow it gets? If I wanted to browse NeoGAF on the thing, would it be unbearable?
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I routinely check out Neogaf and other forums on my cell phone with Opera Mini. Now that the beta for version #4 is out the whole experience is even smoother. This is with an Edge phone on T-mo's network btw.

And :lol @ a minute to load the NYT website with the Iphone. Opera mini opens up NYT in 20 seconds (low quality mode) or 32 seconds (high quality mode).
 
Thanks everyone.

I didn't think EDGE would be pathetically slow. Dial-up is so half a decade ago. :lol

Been considering one these last few days... just so hard to resist.
 
Hopefully one of my more spend-happy dork buddies will buy one of these so I can play with it for awhile. The interface looks amazing, but from the first reviews trickling in I gotta admit the phone's got some odd lackings...

- No function for copying/pasting text.
- No A2DP support.
- No voice dialing.
- Considering how they're pushing the whole "teh real Internet" on your phone, the lack of Flash, Java, and embedded video support is a tad odd.
- Integrated camera doesn't allow recording of videos.

Hopefully some of this stuff will get firmwared away, and I'm interested to see what the partial Exchange support's all about.
 
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