Hands-on with the iPhone - first impressions and more details

 

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Posted on 10 Jan 2007 at 22:46

MacUser sat down with some senior Apple executives plus an iPhone to get a preview of the brand new device, and put some questions to those in the know. Apple is notoriously cagey about future products - and the iPhone qualifies as such partly because it's yet to pass formal accreditation, and partly because it's not yet available, particularly outside the US -so many of our questions were met with polite 'no comment' murmurings, but we did garner a few important details and got a chance to play with the iPhone.

First, our impressions: it's utterly, utterly bewitching. It's much slimmer than you might expect - certainly much thinner than many PDAs, and only very slightly fatter than the slimmest fifth generation iPod -and the screen is superbly high-resolution. It's bright, and navigation is simple. The screen does get a little greasy with so much finger pointing, but it's amazingly intuitive, and surprisingly accurate; you can be quite clumsy and still get the right results. The soft keyboard is surprisingly usable, though in the short time that we had with the device, we weren't getting perfect results, but we were helped by the error correction system. This uses a built-in dictionary to automatically correct typos as you go, and in practice, it seems to work well.
The home button on the front of the device is a physical button that clicks while pressed.
The built-in speaker is loud enough for using the iPhone as a speakerphone, but it's not particularly loud or high-fidelity for listening to music.

As far as the operating system is concerned, there's good and bad news. The good news is that Apple assures us that the iPhone is powered by a 'full-strength' - albeit optimised -version of OS X. The bad news? First of all that the install of OS X - that we were told took up 'significantly less' than half a gigabyte of space - will nevertheless eat into the 4 or 8GB of flash memory. Apple did also confirm that the iPhone would not be open to development by third party developers; all applications developed for the iPhone would come through Apple, though it doesn't rule out developing tools in partnership with other companies, such as with the already-announced Google Maps. Apple would not comment on what version of Mac OS X -Tiger, Leopard or anything else -that currently powered the iPhone.

Third parties can develop hardware accessories only, though our impression was that existing iPod accessories that connect using the 30-pin Dock connector may not work with the iPhone. Certainly, manufacturers of speakers may have to improve shielding if they're not to get interference from cellular communications while playing music.

All synchronisation of data is carried out using iTunes - there is no over-the-air syncing with a .Mac service, for example, and you may not purchase media from the iTunes Store over a Wi-Fi or cellular connection.

Apple executives were very firm when questioned about VoIP: all voice communications are carried out over GSM, and there is no current provision for VoIP technologies from Skype or anyone else.

The deal to partner with Cingular in the US is specific to the US, and when asked if we might expect Apple to partner with Vodafone in the UK - given that Vodafone has a strong presence in mobile data with its 3G coverage, and that Cingular is Vodafone's preferred mobile partner in the US -we were told that the choice to go with Cingular would not impact on deals done outside the US. Apple would not comment when asked if there were any plans to sell the iPhone SIM-free.