synergi's Full Review: iPhone 3G Black (16 GB) Smartphone
First, I do love my iPhone. I have the 16 gig model in black. I am also a complete electronics junkie. If you've ever seen the Onion networks Video about Sony's latest gadget, well that’s me!
The iPhone is cool, it’s sleek, and it’s a touch screen. What is not to love? I'm a 43 year old mom and this puppy is mine! To get the boring things out of the way, YES! It does make and receive phone calls! There is a little icon of a phone at the bottom of the screen, you touch that and there are icons for favorites (the numbers you call most) recent (the numbers that called you and the date they called.) contacts, which of course is your address book, and the virtual keypad for making calls. Once you punch in your number and hit dial, you also have the option to put the call on the iPhone speaker for ear free calls. The last icon is Voicemail, which is pretty self explanatory. Telephone calls are clear, even on speaker phone. (As if I really use this to talk!)
The iPhone has a glass screen that feels really solid. It has a smooth black plastic back and is trimmed in what looks like a silver chrome finish. There is one thing Apple gets right, and that is aesthetics! There is a small silver button on top that will turn off/reboot your IPhone if it ever freezers. Yes there have been a few occasions where I’ve had to restart it but that has only been 2 or 3 times in 9 months. There is a silver button on the side that slides up and down. This will turn the ringer on and off. I find this handy for when I’m in the movies. Beside that, is the volume control button. On the face of the iPhone is the button you press to bring it out of sleep mode. Pressing this, the face lights up with whatever background you chose and it shows you the time. A virtual slider also shows up and you slide this to the right to get to the phones desktop.
Ok now you get into the best part of the iPhone. The main row has a mail, phone, iPod and safari browser button. You can obviously click these to operate those functions. The settings button brings up a lot of different options. You can turn on/off airplane mode, Wi-Fi, change your ring tones or add email accounts. It is already configured to work with Gmail, Yahoo, Aol mail, Mobile Me and Microsoft Exchange. There is also a tab to configure manually other types of email accounts. You can also change the screens brightness, your wallpaper, check your usage, and turn blue tooth on or off and many more options.
The iPhone is basically like a micro computer. Where It truly shines is the App store through Itunes. Every time you hook your iPhone up to charge it, opens up iTunes on your PC. iTunes then syncs the phone with iTunes. If you’ve bought music, downloaded videos etc to iTunes, they will download to your phone if you have that option chosen.
For a small screen the iPhone is really sharp. Sprint was advertising heavily for its Instinct phone. I went to best buy to look at it and it is a nice phone. The one thing I saw that instinct had up on the iPhone, was voice navigation for its GPS. iPhone doesn’t have this and I wish it did. It is not fun trying to drive and look at the screen at the same time. However the one place Instinct was left in the dust, was on web browsing. iPhone is a much better web surfing experience. You see the pages just as you would on your PC. It has none of that mobile web stuff that was always so lacking. Once you see the page of your site laid out, you simply double tap the screen to blow up the part you want to read and tap it again to go back to the original view. You can also pinch and grab to blow up or make your view smaller.
Again, it’s the Apps store that really set the iPhone apart from everyone (Except maybe G1) else. There are Apps for some of everything. Games like Othello, Price as Right, Spades, Poker, name brand games like Monkey Balls, a virtual band app, a fitness app, a Google voice command app. This app you speak say what your looking for like epinions and the browser looks it up for you. You could write a book just on all the apps, some good, some bad, some great!
There are draw backs. First there is no cut n paste feature. However iTunes 3.0 update finally fixes this problem. The battery life if you’re playing videos is only a few hours. I think music is between 5 to 6 hours. For a phone, that’s not great. Another issue is if you want to run one program then start up another, the first program shuts down. So there are no programs running in the background to drain the battery. I can understand this, but even if it is plugged, in it still can’t run more than one app at a time. The coming 3.0 update is finally suppose to push (like IMs) if you are out of the program so you know when someone is sending you a message.
The virtual keyboard lacks any tactical feel which I think Blackberry handled quite well with their Storm phone. Also, the keyboard isn’t always in landscape mode which makes it even harder to type on. This too will change with update 3.0 and about time! If you are a big IMer—like Aim, Msn, etc. You might want a phone like the G1 with a physical keyboard. I am a big IMer and I hardly IM on this phone because of the virtual keyboard.
Since this is about AT&T’s iPhone, I’ll include this about iPhone service. 1.) First of all, the data plan is a rip off. It says unlimited but its really 5gigs. 2.) Other then YouTube, you can’t play videos over Edge/or 3g. It makes me say what the h*ll am I paying for? You pay for data and can’t use it for data. I heard you could play video’s with T-mobiles data plan and its cheaper! If I play any videos its off my own wi-fi in the house. My area also doesn’t have 3g yet so my wi-fi in house is faster then using edge. That means I only use edge when I’m out. Basically I don’t come anywhere close to using 1gig let alone 5 and it’s a rip off they limit you on what type of data you can use. I’m paying 30 a month to read email and surf websites. 3.) No Flash support. Most cells don’t have this yet but I thought I’d put it out there.
Rant over!
I’m not a big listener to music. It is more like a spurt thing, as in 2 months out of the year I might be into music before my interest wanes. Anyway, I thought, I should get myself a MP3 player or an iPod. It actually took me about 7 months to realize my iPhone was an ipod as well! I mean I knew it was but it didn’t actually hit me that it was until I was thinking of buying one.
I have the 16 gig model and I haven’t used very much of it yet. I have converted a few videos over to the format iPhone plays and downloaded music I bought off iTunes. As a video player it is surprisingly very crisp and sharp. I’ve watched tv shows off Joost, (there’s an app for Joost, but come on Hulu!) while I was doing my hair. The iphone has a really loud speaker for such a small device. It is clear and easy to understand without distortion, static or crackling. You can play your favorite music videos, plug in headphones and use it as a iPod. The songs are listed in alphabetical order and easy to find. Tapping on a song once starts playing the song. It shows a picture of the album cover while its playing. If you turn it side ways to landscape mode, you can flip through all the albums you have. That feature looks cool and really impressive.
Speaking of GPS, it is a GPS. Like I said above, it doesn’t do Voice turn by turn, but it does work really well. I tend to hate driving to places I’ve never been because I hate getting lost. This has made me brave enough to travel to places I haven’t gone before. You get a picture of a map with a purple line which is the path you need to drive. A blue dot on the screen is you --moving in real time so it’s easy to see where you need to make turns. It’s pretty simple, you put in the address of where you’re going, and it asks you if you are mapping it from your current location. It already knows where you are so if you’re lost who knows where, the iphone maps from wherever you are! The one thing it doesn't do, is if you miss a turn thats mapped out for you, it doesn't automatically compensate and reroute a new path. You either have to pull over and start from your current location again or drive back to where you missed your turn. Hopefully this will be fixed one day.
There are so many things you can do with this phone it is impossible to review them all. It’s a GPS, it’s a camera, (not a video camera) its an iPod, is a video player, a web browser, and email device, a game device, an eBook reader, a audio book player, add a docking station, insert Iphone and you have a stero. I could go on and on.
Oh yes, did I mention, you can actually make phone calls on it?
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 299 Recommended for: Stylish Trendsetters - Hip and Trendy
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