8GB iPhone Review Part 1: The Good, Bad & Needed

We have been thoroughly testing Apple's new iPhone since it came out last Friday when we picked it up at the 5th Ave Store in the heart of New York City. While the buying experience has been well documented, the activation was not so we will start there.

Slow Activation

AT&T didn't make the first or second step of owning an iPhone fun since when we finally got ours and tried to activate it the process took way too long. We placed calls, surfed the message boards and lost sleep waiting for our service to come online. While the AT&T customer service representatives were friendly, they basically could do nothing so we waiting some more. After a full 11 some hours we finally got the second email saying our iPhone was alive and our true tests began.

Hype Machine

With as much hype as the press and Apple have built up about this device, it is almost impossible for it to live up to all of it. Any devices nicknamed the "Jesus Phone" is going to have to be good. The iPhone, luckily, is a great device and does change everything for the portable device market. Everything from the interface to the syncing works as advertised and it was hard not to fall in love with it within minutes.

It is a slim little device with a glass front touch screen and a brushed metallic back. There are standard buttons for turning it on, changing the volume and silencing it. The front includes only a home button and a speaker hole for your ear. It was a great pleasure to keep in our pockets and while it is a little heavier than it looks the slim body makes it almost disappear. It has shared our pocket with both coins and keys and the screen has made it through as shiny as ever. A shirt or a paper towel always come in handy to wipe it off but don't expect to use it while eating spare ribs or lobster.

Touching Me. Touching You.

The most talked about and controversial feature of the iPhone has to be the touch screen and interface. Yes, there is no physical keyboard and no, you won't miss it. We found that within an hour or two we had gone from poking around at the virtual keys to two thumbs and flying at full speed. The secret in the sauce is letting the iPhone correct you. Don't try to be perfect, just try to be close and let the built in software will figure it out. The iPhone learns new words that you type and adds them to the dictionary which shows just how much Apple thought about this feature. Another big bonus is since the keyboard is really just software it changes based on what application you are in. The keyboard is all numbers when entering a phone number into a contact and has no space bard when entering an email. We would like to see punctuation made a little easier to jump into and out of though. Also, since there are no hard buttons getting from one application to another can take a few more steps. For example we can jump from the calendar to SMS in one button on the Palm Treo but on the iPhone this takes hitting the home button then the SMS button.

The scrolling and pinching of things is also really well done. Photos pop zoom in and lists fly by. Everything you want to do is just a fingerprint or two away. The best way to impress someone with the iPhone is to head to the photos. Flick left and right, squeeze in and rotate. It almost sells itself.

Applications Galore

There are a ton of applications on the iPhone from the calendar to weather, from the camera to YouTube videos but a few of them need to be talked about individually because they are so well done.

Mail is something that we here cannot live without so it was just a joy in our life to have all our accounts sync over from our iMac right onto the iPhone. No passwords or SMTP servers to enter. As with many things from Apple, it just works. Mail looks and feels like some of the best clients out there. Full html and rich text is supported including attachments which make it feel more like a laptop than a smart phone. You can have a ton of accounts and we pressed the limits with ten without a hitch.

Google Maps is also a winning application. While the iPhone doesn't have built in GPS (Global Positioning System) the Google Maps will keep you from getting lost. It includes directions, business lookup and a fabulous interface.

Not All Good

So the iPhone is going to be a huge success and is a winner of a device but over the last few days we have found some of the limitations. The most basic missing feature is the syncing of notes and tasks. There are no task on the iPhone and the Notes just don't sync with anything. We have mentioned it before, but this is a huge gap. There is no instant message program which is a minus and the mail doesn't support individual signatures. None of these things are deal breakers.

In the coming parts of this review we will take a closer look at the Good, The Bad and the Needed.