'I’ve been using my iPhone now for ~2.5 days and I can tell you there are things I love about this phone and there are things I wish it had. Don’t get me wrong, I love this phone and agree with Time that, “[t]he iPhone isn’t just the gadget du jour, it’s a fresh new platform, an exceptionally powerful mobile computer that’s still in its infancy.” But it’s that infancy part that leads me to the things I wish it had. There are just things I wish I could do on my iPhone which I cannot. From the other perspective, I want to congratulate Apple in not falling into one of the largest technology traps there are, trying to do much with a product. If you look at the complaints people have with Microsoft products or with their Treo, it is that the product does a lot of things, but does none of them really well. The iPhone may be missing features I would like to see, but I commend Apple in ensuring that the features it does have work beyond expectations. It is like all of Apple’s products, they may not be perfect and there is room for improvement, but they are far superior to anything else on the market.
First we will start with my wishlist for the iPhone. I know Apple Executives read this blog so here is my simple list, “I want customization!” For example, the default ‘Home’ screen is black with icons for programs. I would like to remove some of the icons which I know I won’t use, rearrange them, add other options and even put my own background on it; none of which is possible. I would also like to be able to put some of the ‘Settings’ options onto that ‘Home’ screen. In particular, I want to move the Bluetooth On/Off switch to my ‘Home’ screen, that way I can turn Bluetooth off when I am not using it to conserve power. I would additionally like to be able to cut and paste. Either within the mail application or from Safari (web-browser) to email. I have heard some other attorneys who edit Word and Excel documents on their Treo’s complain that the iPhone doesn’t edit these types of files. While the iPhone will open PDF’s, Word and Excel documents, it won’t edit them. I personally have never edited a document on my phone simply because I don’t think that is what a phone is made for, but I can understand it being on a wishlist. My response to these attorneys is to go and buy yourself a mini-computer, but we’ll let Apple be the judge in whether to include this on the iPhone. Finally, the last thing I would like to see is customized ringtones, they are imminent so I won’t officially include them in this list.
Given the iPhone is running a modified version of Apple’s Operating System, OS X, none of this wishlist should be that difficult to achieve. So I’ll be waiting. As Time said, the iPhone is in its infancy, these few issues can be worked out with a few lines of additional code and are just a download away. None of them are issues with the phone itself, just usability issues. Now that my wishlist is out of the way, let’s get down to my review.
Hardware
If you didn’t get it the first time, let me say it again, I love this phone. From a physical standpoint, I encourage you to go to your nearest AT&T Retail Store (re-sellers stores don’t have them) there you can hold the phone and touch the screen. You will be amazed at how ‘tight’ it feels. As well-built as the iPod video is, the iPhone feels even more solid. Aesthetically, the iPhone begs to be touched. You cannot help but feel compelled to hold it and run your fingers across its screen. It is a thing of beauty. Which brings us to the first rumor to dispell; fingerprints are not a problem. As you can see in the video I posted on Saturday and in the review below, fingerprints and smudges are visible on the iPhone only when viewed in the right conditions (tilted with the light shining into your eyes) and most importantly, when the iPhone is off. The screen is so vibrant, any fingerprints are simply not visible. Think of your computer screen, the only time you see fingerprints or smudges, unless they are REALLY large, is when the screen is off and you see the reflection from the overhead lights. It’s the same principle with the iPhone. Anyone who thinks this is an issue doesn’t own an iPhone. View the end of this video to see what I mean.
As for accessories, you may have to buy some new ones. Some of your iPod accessories will work with the iPhone and some won’t. You’ll just have to experiment. The iPhone will inform you when you plug an accessory in whether it will function or not. Most Bluetooth headsets will work, though the iPhone does not support wireless earphones yet. The iPhone has built in wireless networking. So instead of being stuck using AT&T’s EDGE network, which was upgraded in select cities Friday morning and will slowly reach cities like Louisville, Kentucky, your iPhone can connect to any local Wi-Fi for internet access, such as at a Panera Bread, Starbucks, or your friendly neighbor who doesn’t have a secured Wi-Fi (I am not condoning theft of Internet access in any way).
Click to compare specs of the iPhone to other PDA’s and Smartphones
While I will not be willing to drop, srcratch or otherwise potentially damage my iPhone to see how well it stands up to things, PCWorld has done it for us. I am frankly amazed at the stress results, I guess the optical glass Apple decided to use was for a reason. Check out the stress test yourself.To conclude the physical description of the phone, it is about the length of the iPod video, only half as thick. The back is a brushed aluminum (not shiny like an iPod’s back, more like the new iPod shuffle). The bottom 1/4 of the back is covered by black plastic so as not to interefere with the iPhone’s phone and bluetooth antennas.The battery does not come out of the phone and after two years of use, the phone will have to be sent back to Apple for replacement at a charge of $40. I personally am not bothered by this as I don’t keep multiple batteries for any of my phones, but I know many attorneys who use multiple batteries a day and this could be one of the main sticking points for them. Just make sure to clear your iPhone’s data prior to sending it in to have the battery replaced.There are only three buttons and one switch on the iPhone. The switch above the volume control on the left and one of my favorite features, turns the phone to vibrate mode. Why all phones don’t have a switch to turn the phone on vibrate is beyond me, given that is the single most used function by most users on any phone. The three buttons are: a lock on the very top edge (rendering the touch-screen inactive), the ‘Home’ button below the touchscreen and a Volume control button on the left side of the phone. It is like all Apple products, simple.
Software
Moving on to the software or interface of the iPhone, I think the best way I can describe it is to tell you this: my 7 year-old nephew Hunter figured out on his own how to view photographs, listen to my iPod and view movies in a few seconds (though he is the smartest 7 year-old I know, I don’t think he could do the same on a Treo). Much like the physical design of the iPhone, the interface is amazingly simple to use. When you turn it on you have to unlock it by sliding a bar across the bottom of the screen to ensure no accidental phone calls are made while in your pocket. You are then taken to the ‘Home’ screen where you can access all of the widgets (applications) on a black screen. Across the bottom are the four functions of the device: Phone, Mail, Safari (Internet) and iPod. the widgets are as follows: Text, Calendar, Photos, Camera, YouTube, Stocks, Maps, Weather, Clock, Calculator, Notes and Settings. Their descriptions are pretty self-explanatory and I will deal with them one by one:
1. Text- This is the iPhone’s text messaging program. It handles multiple conversations which you choose once you select the widget. From there, you are taken to a familiar desktop text messaging program which displays the conversation in colored dialog bubbles, with your text assigned one color and the person you are texting in another color. Because the iPhone stores your conversations and places new messages into the appropriate conversation, this makes sustained text message conversations with multiple people quite easy. Great for messaging an assistant or collegaues and keeping up with the conversation you last left off the previous day.
2. Calendar- Does just what it says. 
I personally feel like this is one of the most solid calendars I’ve ever seen. To input a time, you scroll with a flick of your finger through a spindle with numbers on it. This is extremely intuitive and oddly fun to use. You are of course given all the usual options of making the event all day, repeat or set an alert. The calendar syncs with OS X’s iCal and of course, Outlook. Outlook Exchange support is imminent and should be available for download in the next few weeks according to Apple. I think this and one other missing feature I’ll mention soon is the only draw-back keeping the corporate world and attorneys from embracing the iPhone. I’ve recorded a video of what the iPhone’s Calendar loos like and how it functions. You can view it by clicking the image to the left.
3. Photos- One of the neatest widgets, Photos is how all of your photographs are viewed. You can view the photographs in either standard frame or landscape mode, which is activitated by turning the iPhone 90 degrees. To change photographs, you flick them to one side or another. There is a slide-show option with different options for transitions taken from Apple’s Keynote, such as Ripple, Cube, Wipe and Dissolve. This is one of the applications on the iPhone no other phone can touch (no pun intended) because the iPhone’s screen is stunning. The brightness and resolution are amazing making your photographs look as good as they do on your computer screen. To zoom, as you know, you use two fingers to ‘spread’ the image and it zooms right in. You’ve got to see this on an iPhone to appreciate the clarity. The resolution is 480×320, which is the same aspect ratio as most cameras today, so there is no need for cropping and re-sizing as with most PDA’s out there on the market.
4. Camera- Only 2 Megapixels and no video. I have no idea why there is only a 2 megapixel camera on the iPhone given the cheapness of 3 megapixels, but the photos taken with it look acceptable to me and besides, it’s not touted as a camera. The no video option is a non-issue to me because honestly, who has ever needed a cell video camera in their practice? There is no zoom feature either, which makes me happy as all cell phones use digital zoom, which makes pictures look horrible. I’d rather see a clear picture from far away than a digitally zoomed fuzzy image any day of the week.
5. YouTube- This is for the younger crowd. I find it interesting, but by no means a selling point. Given AT&T’s slow EDGE network, videos take about 10-15 seconds to get going, but the quality is impressive given the use of the H.264 compression. Not all YouTube videos are available right now, but Google has promised to have them all converted to H.264 by the middle of July and they are available as they convert them. Now you can search for the opposing party in YouTube during a deposition, you never know what you’ll find.
6. Stocks- Great widget which most phones have now. Displays the usual stock information with past performance graph.
7. Maps- This is another great feature for a non-GPS enabled phone. You have access to Google Maps which will display a map of an address, satellite view and routing information from two addresses. Just like on the web version of Google Maps, you can get turn-by-turn instructions with the Map changing at each junction so you can see that area of the map. The best feature? Live traffic conditions overlayed on the map show clear conditions (green interstate), moderate (yellow) and red (heavy). VERY cool feature. Who needs a GPS with this on their phone? I’ve already used it to find a client’s house when I didn’t bring the instructions with me.
8. Weather- Displays the weather for whatever zip code you choose, with support for multiple cities to be stored. How do you change cities? You guessed it, the finger flick.
9. Clock- Yes, it’s a clock with the usual functions. World Clock, Alarms, Stopwatch and Timer.
10. Calculator- No need to explain what this does, it’s just a basic calculator.
11. Notes- A simple notepad program to take assorted notes. Great for attorneys who want to write things down for later usage. The downside is, once written down, they can’t be cut and pasted into an email, though you can email an entire note to someone. Disappointing and hopefully corrected soon.
12. Settings- Here you have all options for all aspects of the iPhone. An Airplane mode for travel so you can turn all wireless aspects of your iPhone off to make it airplane friendly so you can watch videos and listen to music on an airplane. This is where you change ring-tones, wallpaper, turn bluetooth on and off (hopefully not for much longer) and other general settings such as setting up a VPN.
Virtual Keyboard
I have recorded a short video (or click the image below) in an attempt to dispell any misconceptions which are floating around the Internet concerning typing on the iPhone. As you can see from the video below, typing on the iPhone is quite a bit different 
than typing on a Treo or a Blackberry. Instead of having the predictive type guessing what you are typing and attempting to predict it, the iPhone simply waits until you’ve typed the word and attempts to correct the word taking into account that you may have hit the wrong key when typing. It works very well and if you trust it, you can type faster than on any other Smartphone. I have seen numerous other videos and reviews saying that it is so difficult to type with two thumbs and the only way to accurately type is with one finger, but if you simply trust the phone and not worry about hitting the proper key each time, the iPhone almost always figures out what you were typing and it’s a simple matter of hitting the SpaceBar to have it choose the word. Take a look at the video and you will see what I mean. If you give the virtual keyboard some time, you will be rewarded. I recently went to the Wayback Machine to take a look at what people said about blackberry’s when they came out, guess what the complaints were: people couldn’t get used to typing on them because the keys were so small. Now people are complaining because they can’t type on the iPhone the way they type on their Blackberry. It’s a basic principal, people resist change; just give the keyboard more than 30 minutes in which to get used to it.
Phone
Moving on to the bottom buttons, pressing ‘Phone’ accesses the phone where your contacts are stored, access call logs, favorite people to call and access your voicemail. I’ve recorded a short video displaying the iPhone’s Phone features. To dispell another myth, you can just type a number in and dial it. There is a keypad button in the Phone section which allows you to do just that. I think this was a rumor placed by Sprint or Verizon and is patently absurd, but a Sprint employee accosted me in CompUSA two weeks ago and told me exactly that when I told him I didn’t want a Sprint phone because I was getting an iPhone.
While you can’t perform a search for contacts in the address book, they are sorted into sections for each letter, with each letter accessible by the alphabet running down the right of the screen. I have over 2,000 contacts in my phone and can get from A-Z in 3 seconds and to any letter of the alphabet with one push of my finger. No number takes more than 3 seconds to find. So if you keep all of your client’s numbers in your phone, don’t worry, you can find them even without a search feature.
The most amazing part of the Phone is the voicemail. Finally, Apple has solved the problem of having 30 voicemails and being forced to listen to all of them before you can listen to your partner’s message about the latest crisis. Each voicemail is shown, listing the caller and name (if in your address book) much the same way emails are listed in your email. To listen, you simply press the voicemail you want to listen to and it is played back, with the standard slider to rewind and forward just like a video on your computer. This feature alone is worth the price of the iPhone and is one of the revolutionary aspects of this phone. Definitely in the category of “why didn’t someone think of that before!?”
It can check IMAP, POP3 and also supports Push mail from Yahoo! (tell that to any crackberry user who claims the iPhone doesn’t support Push). Microsoft Exchange is supported currently using unsecure IMAP, but secure IMAP will have to wait until next month. Your IT department will not be pleased. You can do everything in the mail application you can do with other phones and switch between multiple accounts and account types with the press of a button.SafariThis is the PDA killer application. Because the iPhone runs Apple’s OS X, it contains a full working web browser, Safari. We’re not talking about your mom and dad’s cell-phone web-browsing we’ve all come to hate, I’m talking about a web page that looks exactly as it does on your desktop. Obviously, such a view is small, so the iPhone zooms into an area on the webpage by tapping on that area. You can also use the pinch feature used in the photo viewer to zoom in and out of a page. Additionally, you can have more than one window open at a time, a great solution to not being able to use tabs.iPod
The iPhone is definitively the best iPod ever made. My wife has a Video iPod and while hers sounds good, it doesn’t hold a match to the audio quality of the iPhone. The video plays on the iPod in landscape mode, so you have to turn the iPhone sideways, solving the problem of the Video iPod not playing widescreen movies that you can actually watch. The iPhone has Cover-Flow, sort of a juke-box style method of browsing your albums, allowing you to scroll through the album covers to find the artist of album you want. When you find it, you tap on the album and it turns over, showing you the rear of the album cover which has all of the songs in that album. Click on a song and it starts playing. The other features of the iPod are just like normal iPods, with playlists and the ability to rate your songs . Definitely something an attorney needs to have for some downtime. Just don’t go throwing away your iPod to fast, no matter how great my iPhone sounds I don’t think I’ll be taking it to the gym anytime soon.ConclusionThis is an amazing product and it’s only version 1.0. Upcoming changes are the ability to drag and drop files onto the iPhone from your desktop, secure Microsoft Exchange support and probably the ability to remotely access your desktop computer. That is why I am so excited by it, if Apple has done such a great job in bringing this product to market without feedback, imagine what version 2.0 will be like. Look at the iPod, you may not remember it, but the first version had a wheel that really spun, a monochrome blue screen and was bigger than a deck of cards…it turned out to revolutionize how we listen to music in less than 10 years. What will we think of the iPhone in 2017?