Apple iPhone review

After the huge amount of hype, the iPhone needs little introduction. Fortunately, it's as good as Apple makes out. As well as being an 8GB iPod touch, it's a powerful and incredibly easy-to-use smartphone.

The iPhone's user interface is a triumph. It has only four physical buttons: two control the volume, one locks the phone and one goes back to the main menu. The rest of its functions are controlled using the touchscreen. This is more advanced than the touchscreens of most smartphones. It recognises dragging motions as well as simple prods, and you can use more than one finger at a time. This means you can move around webpages and documents by dragging your finger around the screen, and give lists of names a flick to scroll through them. It works beautifully, and feels far smoother and more natural than using a normal touchscreen and stylus.

Typing is done on an onscreen keyboard. The keys are fairly small, and you have to concentrate to avoid hitting the wrong key, but it's better than the onscreen Windows Mobile keyboard. The iPhone has a built-in email client, which makes it easy to set up a POP or IMAP email account, and it arranges text messages in chat threads to help you keep track of text conversations. It also has Visual Voicemail, which displays your voicemail messages in a list so that you can choose which to listen to rather than having to listen to each in turn. The iPhone certainly makes sending and keeping track of your messages easier than any phone we've seen. You can even view, but not edit, Word and Excel documents.

It's certainly good at messaging, but the iPhone's biggest draw is its web browser. It uses a version of Apple's Safari, and is easily the best mobile browser available. It renders webpages in full screen with no reformatting. Images look superb, and you can navigate by dragging your finger around the page, pinching your fingers together to zoom in and moving them apart to zoom out. The only problem is that the fastest mobile data standard it supports is EDGE, which is slower than 3G and rare outside London. Most of the time you will have to use GPRS, which is about as fast as a dial-up modem. However, the phone's O2 contract includes access to The Cloud's wireless network, so you can connect over 802.11g if you're near a hotspot.

There are two significant problems. First, the headphone socket is so deeply recessed that you can't plug in a standard pair of headphones without an ugly adaptor. As the iPhone is meant to be an iPod touch as well, this is very annoying. Second, it's expensive. You can only buy the iPhone on an expensive £35-a-month contract, so it will cost you a total of £900 over the course of a minimum 18-month contract. If you can take the cost and lack of 3G, though, the iPhone is superb and the best smartphone you can buy.

Author: Chris Finnamore