Apple iPhone Review

Camera Viewfinder

Camera:

The camera on the iPhone is a 2MP camera which does not have autofocus. The interface for the camera is very basic and the only options available are to take a photo and go to the photo Album. Picture quality is above average. Photos come out with rich colors and defined lines. In very sunny areas, the light spots tend to come out over exposed and make the rest of the image much darker. There is no option to record a video with the iPhone.

When viewing photos, you can view them individually or in a slideshow. While there is no button for zooming in, you do have the option and it works exactly like on the map. Pinching zooms out while the opposite motion will zoom in.













iPhone’s iPod:

Apple promised that the iPhone will provide their best iPod yet and they certainly have delivered on this part. Well, it’s almost their best but there are two different reasons for this, the price and size. At $499 for the 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB version, you are getting a really, really small iPod. Not only that but that price isn’t including the cost of the plan. Even if you have the lowest plan, which costs $59.99 a month, the total cost of a 4GB iPhone comes to around $1,220.00 for a year of usage. For any iPod, that is a lot of money.

The iPod player is all touch-screen as well and is very well laid out and clean. When listening to music only two bars appear, one at the top and one at the bottom. The top informs you which song you are listening to, which album it comes from, and by whom it was written. To the left is a back arrow and to the right is a shortcut to the song list. The bottom bar has the play/pause, fast-forward, rewind, back, and forward buttons as well as the volume slider. So that videos can be viewed much more conveniently, the iPod can be viewed in landscape mode.

Apple has decided to return album artwork to the iPod which makes going through albums just a wonderful pleasure. It feels like going through actually albums. It is a great feature that is most welcome.
Songs can be played through either the build-in speaker at the bottom or through headphones. At max volume, the speaker tends to distort to music. Sound through the headphones is much clearer and more defined. Still, the speaker is a great feature if you just want to play a few songs at a gathering or share one with a friend or two. The headphone jack is recessed and prevents you from using many headphones. Even using the headphones from a Creative Zen Vision W was impossible due to the width.

Music is managed with iTunes and is not drag-and-drop. Instead, you have a separate library from which the iPhone syncs to. It seems like this can add to more unneeded management down the road since you have to clean out the library, put in new songs, and then finally sync the iPhone.

All the EQ settings included have been brought from the 5th generation iPods. Instead of accessing them through the iPod menu, you have to go to the iPhone’s settings and change them there.

Organization is much like that of the regular iPod. Each song can be organized by artist, album, genre, composer, or playlist. If none of these work for you, all of the songs can be viewed. The songs will be organized by letters, A, B, C, etc, and to quickly get to where you want to, all the letters are displayed in a vertical line next to the songs and clicking on one will take you to the desired group.

Video Library

Video Playback

Video:

As expected, the iPhone’s iPod does have the ability to play movies. It would be a major letdown is this was not possible especially considering the gorgeous display. When the player is exited while watching a movie, the movie will be resumed from where it left off.

In our test to see which movies played, we were only able to get the MPEG4 H.263 file with QVGA resolutions to play. The "Get a Mac" advertisement found on Apple's own website was downloaded (it is .mov file encoded in H.264 codec) but would not play on the iPhone. This is odd as Apple claims that the H264 format is supported. With the video that did play, display was wonderful. The display is much better than the 5G iPod. No lag was present during the video.






Now, considering that the iPhone is a phone, one would think that it couldn’t be used on a plane but there is the ability to turn-on airplane mode. Also, the iPod can play music in the background letting you resume your work with having the ability to listen to music from the same device at the same time.

iPhone is the first phone to support YouTube. Unlike the mobile version of YouTube, this version is a fully built-in menu where you can view the top viewed videos, featured videos, bookmarks, or search for any specific video. This does not update with the server and it takes some time for new videos to appear on the iPhone. While YouTube can work on an EDGE network, it is suggested that the videos are viewed on a wireless network to improve speeds. It is a shame to have such a wonderful feature and have a phone lacking 3G.