Apple iPhone Review - Conclusion

Conclusion

I could write for days about iPhone only to find that both Apple and independent developers had extended the handset's functionality significantly while I was locked away with my word processor. Suffice it to say that iPhone is as much a mobile entertainment, communications, and personal data device as it is a cell phone. In fact, it's the basic cell phone functions that iPhone is worst at. Calls and ringtones are too quiet, there's no voice dialing, and making a call is often a multiple click process that involves pressing the Home button, touching the Phone icon, touching the Keypad icon, and then dialing the number on the touch screen.

Beyond that, iPhone's advanced functionality is hampered by EDGE-only access to data networks, a lack of stereo Bluetooth or any kind of Bluetooth profiles for exchanging files, no flash for the camera, no external media controls, a bizarrely designed audio jack that's forced many an iPhone user to take an X-Acto knife to his favorite earphones, and a sealed-up back panel that means if you drain your battery before you can make it back home or to the hotel, you're out of luck. A non-user replaceable battery means carrying a spare on your next business trip will do you no good at all.

That being said, iPhone is the closest thing to a perfect mobile device I've ever tried. I hesitated before writing that sentence, and I'm grimacing now that I'm tapping it out, but I'm pretty certain it's true bearing in mind that my wants for a mobile device may be quite different from your own. iPhone's industrial design, amazingly useable display, and intuitive user interface puts it ahead of SuperPhone competitors like the Helio Ocean, Nokia N95, and BlackBerry Curve when it comes my particular preferences. Ocean's got a physical QWERTY board and 3G data, N95's got a 5 MP camera, GPS and 3G data, and Curve's got a QWERTY board and BlackBerry email - those are features I wish iPhone had, and they're on fantastic devices that many people will choose over iPhone for those (and other) specific reasons. But in terms of combining a foward-looking feature set with innovative extras, a great form factor, and menus that make sense, nothing can top iPhone right now.

iPhone is frustrating because it so clearly could be so much more. And it's extra frustrating because as I'm writing this, Apple just mounted a counter-offensive against an open source community that came together specifically to make iPhone as "much more" as possible. Still, Apple has made an outstanding product. If you need a phone that makes phone calls and not much else, iPhone is not for you. If you're interested in a phone that can access Web and email, and maybe play music or videos, manage your calendar, and let you carry some photos around (and really, most mid-to-high end handsets these days do these things), iPhone is well worth a look. At $599 I thought it was over-priced. At $399 (or the $299 I paid for the now defuct 4GB model), it's right on par with other high-end models, and it simply blows them away when it comes to Web browsing and playing music, videos, and photos.

iPhone has the potential to be the beginning of a full-on "mobile communicator" platform that could cause Apple to literally revolutionize the ways in which we compute and communicate - and to inspire Apple's competitors to up their own level of innovation. Here's hoping that this first release - which is already a pretty amazing product - in fact proves to be only the beginning of something really, really good.

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