iPhone 3G Review

Email, Internet & Other Built-in Functionality

The iPhone has many additional features. The built-in camera is only 2 megapixels, but it takes adequate photos. It is easy to download your photos to the computer because when you hook up the iPhone with the included USB cable, the iPhone shows up in My Computer as an icon that says iPhone Camera. Just click on that icon to see your photos. You can see your photos in the iPhone by touching the Photo icon on the Home screen. This will take you to a Photo Album page, where you will see any photo you have taken with the iPhone in an area called Camera Roll. Pictures that you are synching with iTunes will show up in a separate area on the same screen.

The built-in GPS on this new 3G iPhone will geo-tag your photos with your exact location, if you like. The GPS can also pinpoint your location to be used by Google Maps and other applications that give you directions or find sights, restaurants, and other points-of-interest in your current vicinity. Unfortunately, turn-by-turn directions are not yet available. You can get a map of where you are and where you want to go, but you have to look at the map for the directions.

Apple has added Microsoft Exchange and enterprise support for email with the iPhone 3G. This makes it a viable competitor to the Blackberry for business use. As shown in Figure 14, email on the iPhone is clear and easy-to-read. Just tap to open any email. Click Edit at the top of the screen to delete the email or move it to a folder. Even if you don’t have an Exchange server, the iPhone can easily synch with Outlook. It will also synch with a new Apple consumer service, MobileMe, which offers synchronized email, calendars, photos and contacts for $100 a year.

Figure 14: Email on the iPhone.

The iPhone uses Apple’s Safari Web browser. This is great for surfing on the small screen. Most Web pages are perfectly readable. The iPhone Safari browser doesn’t support Adobe Flash, Windows Media Video or Java, and this is a loss that we would like to see rectified in the future. Still, even with that lack of support for Web standards, the overall browsing experience is a good one, especially for such a small device. The finger-touch zooming that we mentioned before helps the browsing process. The iPhone also has a built-in accelerometer so that when you turn the iPhone from portrait (vertical), as shown in Figure 15, to landscape (horizontal), as shown in Figure 16, the display automatically adjusts. This is very handy for the Internet and we wish it were also available in email.

Figure 15: The Internet in portrait position.

Figure 16: The Internet in landscape position.

The iPhone comes with icons on the main screen for Weather, Stocks, and YouTube. All of these can be easily adjusted for your location and choices. The YouTube area lets you see the most viewed videos and top rated videos and also lets you bookmark and search for videos. There is also a useful Calculator and a Note area. The four-function calculator turns into a scientific calculator when you rotate the phone to the horizontal position. The iPhone also supports instant language switching so when the on-screen keyboard appears, the keys change to reflect the language you’ve selected in the iPhone settings.