Hands-on Review: Apple iPhone - Part 2 of 2

[Continued from part 1] Sounds good, right? Why would I say the iPhone isn't all it's cracked up to be? Where to begin...

Let's start with email. Setting it up is easy, but on day one I only got one of three test accounts (Yahoo! Mail and Gmail) to work with the iPhone. On day two the others began to operate, inexplicably. Fetching mail is simple and transparent... only some messages—just regular text—came through as completely blank. And be assured that "Sent from my iPhone" will be appended to the bottom of every message you send. I guess it's a badge of hipness.

Web Browsing vs. Pokey Cell Phone Service

Web browsing is a truly awesome affair... as long as you're on a Wi-Fi network and not on the EDGE cellular one. If you're away from a hotspot, pages crawl their way open. Many sites don't load at all. Why? Because EDGE is lame and the iPhone, unlike virtually every other phone hitting the market today, has no 3G support. Steve Jobs has claimed he didn't include 3G in the iPhone because 3G is too primitive and doesn't have enough national coverage. That's absurd, but even if coverage was limited, wouldn't you rather have high-speed support somewhere instead of nowhere? If you aren't sitting in your house or at a Wi-Fi hotspot, web browsing with the iPhone is frustrating and nearly useless. And if you're at home, using a computer to browse the web is far more satisfying. The lack of 3G in the iPhone is nothing less than a deal-breaker.

Much fanfare erupted when Apple revealed the iPhone would support YouTube. And it's great... if you want to watch the day's handful of greatest hits and that's it. I had hoped I'd be able to use YouTube to watch my personal videos there, accessing them whenever I wanted to show them off instead of busting out a PC. No such luck: Unless you have tens of thousands of ratings and the system's blessing, your videos won't be available at all (no, not even by searching for them): Only the hottest of the hot are available on the iPhone. How many times can you watch the Numa Numa guy? I got bored quickly with it. Plus: Quality of the videos is also dependent on the network: They look good on Wi-Fi, awful (nearly unwatchable) on EDGE.

You Might Be Here

The integrated mapping feature is nifty, but the more you use it the less helpful it seems unless you already know basically where you're going and how to get there. There's no GPS in the iPhone (a tragic flaw), so you have to click a "next" arrow every time you reach a waypoint in your journey. The only problem: For new destinations you may not realize when you reach each turn and forget to tap the screen, especially when, say, a freeway changes its official name for no reason (and the map software tells you this is a "turn"), something common throughout the country.

Null's Big List of Grievances

Other issues are equally troubling. The camera isn't bad... if there's lots of light. In dim situations (there's no flash) the slightest movement leads to useless pics. I had less trouble with the keyboard than I thought I would, but it does take some getting used to. It's still easier and faster to type on a Treo, and the software never stopped trying to correct my daughter's name, "Zoe," to "SOE" (an acronym for Sony Online Entertainment; wow, that is helpful!), no matter how many times I typed it. The SMS interface is beautiful... but there's no instant messaging. You can't use the iPhone as a modem with your PC (of course it's so slow I'm not sure you'd want to anyway). There's no "mark as spam" button in the email client. No games. No video recording. You can't download music directly to the phone (or even save anything from the web at all). And don't forget this you-gotta-be-kidding-me flaw: No custom ringtones! (This is a music phone, right?) You're locked into AT&T for two long years. And then there's the battery: It's reported to offer 8 hours of talk time. I squeaked out 5 hours, 20 minutes; fair, but disappointing. And it can't be replaced since the iPhone is sealed. Alone none of these flaws are awful, but they add up. And the more you use the phone, the more what it can't do drives you insane.

This would all be quibbling if the iPhone were priced like a toy instead of the computer it's supposed to be. At $600, it's priced about twice what it's worth in its current state. I know Apple can (and probably will) fix many of these problems with software updates and future versions, but there's no way I can recommend paying that kind of money for 8GB of flash memory (market value: $80), a quirky interface, and the Apple logo. Jobs tries to spin it by saying that you're paying $200 (or $300) for the iPod and only another $300 for the phone. Both are overpriced. Apple loves to ship stripped-down products and slowly upgrade them over time.The original iPod was rather clunky, and it took the company a couple of rounds to refine the product into the sophisticated music player we've come to love. But at $600 plus $60 a month, that's just not going to cut it here.

The Final Word (At Last!)

The verdict: The iPhone is a beautiful and impressive piece of art. It's miles ahead of so-called iPhone killers like the Samsung UpStage and the LG Chocolate, but it's still not fully baked. Five years from now we'll probably all be toting an iPhone-like device with us everywhere we go. It might even look a lot like the original iPhone, but it'll do a whole lot more and do it much better, too. The telco world's about to enter a huge era of upheaval and change—almost certainly for the better. But if you buy an iPhone now, in 12 to 18 months, the stripped-down capabilities of iPhone 1.0 are going to look extremely quaint... and you'll still have another year on your contract! Now that's really gonna hurt.

Bottom line on iPhone: Nice little gadget, but I'll wait for the next version.

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