So.. After a long time I managed to eek out some time for blogging…
This post is dedicated to my shiny new gadget… Apple iPhone…
Wah… After a loooooooooooong wait of nearly one and a half year, iPhone was finally available in Singapore starting from Oct 22nd 2008.
In this post, I’ll try to review every aspect of the Phone, from the phone software to app compatibility to hardware and also try to compare it with competing phones…
First aspect.. the Hardware…
iPhone is not necessarily the best phone in terms of hardware compared to other contemporary phones. The camera is just a 2 mega pixel one compared to the samsung omnia which has a whopping 5 mpx. The phone is thinner than every other phone yet providing a battery life that is better than most phones except blackberries where iPhone falls by a small margin…
Many reviews point out that iPhone has a very poor battery life… But I would like to defend that. Yes, you might have to charge your phone in the mid of the day.. but that is only when you use your iPhone for over 4 or 5 hrs like me 
… I usually browse close to an hour simultaneously listening to iPod while commuting. When I reach office, the battery meter is usually at 75%… It’s perfectly fine as nearly every other mobile phones of this class offer around 4 hrs of 3G Internet.
But because the iPhone offers the best mobile Internet experience, I would expect Apple to offer a better battery performance even at the expense of my iPhone becoming a couple of mm thicker.
The graphics chip inside the iPhone is pretty awesome and there isn’t any jitter or lost frames while watching movies. So is the processor, a whopping 620 MHz underclocked to 430 or something. The iPhone is pretty close to a Windows 98 machine and no wonder, Quake III arena has been ported to iPhone though available only for jailbroken ones.
iPod
iPhone’s iPod app is pretty good. If one has to compare it with the iPod, I would say that the sound quality of iPhone is slightly better at the expense of a little bass. Yeah.. the bass is slightly weaker for soft rock music and pretty awesome of hard rock genre. The user interface of the app has got to be the best in the world as it has become more easier to browse through your collection. But given the 16 gig meagre space, iPhone’s UI may not be very useful as users tend to store only around 10 Gig of music(??). I would be happy if Apple launches a hard-drive based iPod touch or an iPhone to make better use of the user interface.
Though the UI is great, it still has some greatly missing features that are present even in the most basic mp3 phones. Yeah you heard me… Playlist creations on iPhone is still missing (except for the on the go playlists which can’t even be renamed). the iPod still seems to be a passive app that depends on iTunes to build meta data for it. Synchronize your songs and play it on the go type of interface. The search feature found in the iPod 5.5 Generation is missing in iPhone. I would love to have this feature. This “missing thing”, creating data on the iPhone seems to be pervasive throughout the iPhone. For example you can view your pdf attachments but cannot download them to your iPhone for reading it offline. (There is no finder, storage manager or file manager for that instance… more on this later…) Lyrics support is great and I like the overlay of lyrics on the album art. Apple has finally added support for lyrics added in other languages including tamil, though the rendering seems to be incorrect at times.
iPhone as a Phone
As El Jobso explained in his stevenotes, the killer app for a phone is “making calls”. As such on the iPhone, its easy to make calls,. But the edge over for the iPhone is that, it makes other in-call operations like viewing your phone book, placing a call on hold, swapping between two calls, checking emails or any such task like that is made easier than every other phone. But I do have one missing feature. There is no clear distinction between outgoing and incoming calls and the call meter does not show how many outgoing minutes i’ve used. It’s probably “Made for America” device where I believe most of the incoming calls are charged at outgoing rates. Another great feature is the grouping of phone numbers as you type it. iPhone uses the regional settings to detect how to group your numbers. For example (65 1234 5678 for Singapore) or (91 44 879765783) for India etc.,
Email on iPhone
The imap email support for gmail seems to be great, but I would prefer Google offers some kind of push email to iPhone. The mail app does not synchronize all the folders which means if you have rules set on the server to move your emails directly to a folder (or label + archive), iPhone will not notify you of a new mail.
Secondly the new mail notification tone is of very low volume and there is no continuous notification if you have not acknowledged the first. To add to it, the new mail notification tone cannot be changed and there isn’t even a choice of tones which you can select. However the user interface is elegant and a majority of operations can be done at ease. I just archive my emails using the web interface now. Everything else, I do it on my iPhone.
Internet on iPhone
Though much hype has been around the missing Java/Flash support, you don’t find that a great problem as you tend to get a “ad-free” experience without flash. The screen is large and the UI is designed just for casual browsing and it’s great. There is however no support for syncing iPhone bookmarks with Firefox or with foxmarks online servers. You can however firefox bookmarks to IE using a variety of plugins available (just Google for it). The app’s quality is however not great as it crashes a lot and feels “un-apple”. Sometimes while it crashes, it does not even re-open the windows which I was browsing the last time. 3G is great in Singapore and though the advertised limit is 3.6 Mbps, I get around 1.2 Mbps download speed, which is more than enough for browsing on a mobile device.
Singtel offered a generous 1GB @ 3.6 Mbps for my plan though there are plans upto a download limit of 50GB for the same cost at a lower speed (1Mbps). However I use only around 350 MB per month browsing two hours a day over 3G. Because iPhone does not support tethering your device with a laptop i would not rate the Internet on iPhone to be one of the best. Jail broken iPhones however do support tethering. Apple is notoriously not supporting this feature as AT&T’s crippled 3G network will be hogged even badly. Still in this field, iPhone seems to be an American device rather than a International device.
Singtel’s Network
Singtel’s 3G network is quite ubiquitous except for some underground stations and as such I’ve never experienced call drops neither did my iPhone switches to EDGE while browsing. Because the city is also WI-FI enabled at many MRT stations, iPhone seamlessly switches between 3G and “Wireless@SG” network seamlessly. However, unless you complete your browser authentication, other apps using Internet connection seems to fail. That is if you are sending a mail and iPhone switches to WIFI, you have to close the mail app, open safari, authenticate the wireless access via browser, close browser and open mail again. Or switch off WIFI or forget Wireless@SG network as I do.
Third party app support
The ecosystem around iPhone development seems to be so hot that Stanford is offering iPhone development classes for teaching students on how to write apps for the iPhone!!! The quality of the third party apps seems to be pretty good, kudos to the SDK. Free as well as low cost games are too good. This could basically stem from the fact that Apple blocks out useless apps from the App Store. However, there ain’t no fring or skype for iPhone unless you jail break it. Which means you cannot make a skype to skype free voip call wit
h your iPhone though technologically it is possible. Again, Apple is crippling iPhone because AT&T wants to.
What I expect from Apple in the forth coming firmware releases
iPhone still does not have skype or VOIP via 3G. I think this will be available only when Apple divorces AT&T.
iPhone badly needs a file manager. Though there is an app called “AirSharing” and a lot many, I simply cannot integrate it with other iPhone apps. For example it’s not possible to store email attachements for later reading.
Bluetooth A2DP – The crippled bluetooth profile needs a great revamp. As of now bluetooth filesharing, printing files through a bluetooth printer etc., are simply impossible. bluetooth serves only for hands free phone calls as of now. You can’t share anything over bluetooth. Very bad Apple, very bad…
iPhone still does not have a “copy/paste” functionality. you cannot simply copy text from safari and email it. This is a must have feature for a smart phone.
iPhone still does not have mobile TV support. Even an app will suffice, but unfortunately there ain’t one.
More features in the iPod app including playlist creation, sorting the list of songs by any column right on the iPhone and such are missing. Custom equalizer is also missing in the iPhone.
iPhone tethering is badly needed atleast for countries like Hongkong and Singapore where Singtel offers around 50GB monthly data limit and nearly 100,000 iPhone owners (in a country with 4.5 million population).
A larger storage could be a “nice to have” feature.
Hope the review was interesting. Leave your comments…
–
Mugunth
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