David Pogue was one of the lucky few to get his hands on Apple’s iPhone before the rest of the world. He does a pretty good job of poking fun at the media’s attention to the phone. But how well does the phone live up to the hype?
Starting with the exterior, the screen does smudge easily, but cleaning it just takes a swipe with your shirt sleeve. Thankfully, the glass screen does not easily scratch. The phone is slim, sleek and sexy, making other smartphones look big and bulky.
video after the jump
He was very impressed by the interface of the iPhone..’It’s fast, beautiful, menu-free, and dead simple to operate. You can’t get lost” Visual voicemail is awesome, a vast improvement to the robotic voices that we’re accustomed to hearing when we check our messages.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcRfAaIb2Ro[/youtube]
The web browser really did it for him, it’s easy to use, just a flick of your finger to scroll, double-taps to enlarge and rotate between portrait and landscape modes. We knew all of this already from the demo video, but it’s good to hear that it really does work as well as we’d hoped.
Battery life wasn’t as impressive as Apple claimed. He only got 5 hours of video and 23 hours of audio. Then again, he had on WiFi the whole time, so that would probably explain a good portion of the lost time.
Typing wasn’t as much fun as some of the other functions. Though it was tolerable with the word completion and the fact that the instructional leaflet told him to just “trust” the keyboard. “It sounds like new-age baloney, but it works; once you stop stressing about each individual letter and just plow ahead, speed and accuracy pick up considerably.”
The call quality wasn’t the best. This was mostly because AT&T’s poor network coverage. So your experience may vary. Hopefully if you’re in a good area you shouldn’t have too much of a problem.
Internet browsing was great, while on WiFi. However, browsing off of AT&T’s EDGE network was slow, painfully 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.”
That is very disheartening. With the great web browser that the iPhone has, it will be wasted when you aren’t near a WiFi hotspot. Whether or not it will be enough to prevent the iPhone from taking off will be decided in just a few short days. He did note that “A future iPhone model will be able to exploit AT&T’s newer, much faster data network, which is now available in 160 cities.” Some people might just want to wait for that version 2.0. But if you can deal with the slow internet, it would make a great phone.
The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype [via NYT]
