The Apple iPhone 3G...From A Critic's Point of View

The new Apple iPhone 3G came out in stores a month ago in 70 special countries around the world. All around, people were grabbing their kids, grabbing the lawn chairs, and waiting hours outside stores for their very own iPhone!


Of course, I found it necessary to read and see what this iPhone was all about. I won't have the opportunity to try it out myself after I've denounced the AT&T service and decided to stick to T-Mobile, which does not offer the iPhone. Which is fine by me.

I don't like to write about anything without doing my research first, so I went straight to the obvious place: the Apple website. Let me first note the guy who is talking about the phone says "Over the next 30 minutes I'm going to give you a brief tour of the iPhone". 30 minutes? I don't know who Apple thinks has 30 minutes to sit looking at a demonstration of a phone, except me.

I decided to do a real-time run through of the tutorial below, listing the main points as I go along.

Getting Started

The guided tour-turned-user-manual started in a very unconvincing way. It mentions how sleek and comfortable holding the iPhone is and begins to walk the viewer through the steps to lock the touchscreen and all sorts of other goodies. It shows you how to search for contacts and make a call. Guess what, kids: you can do things while you're on a call, like search the web and look for other contacts to bother! Gee, what an interesting boost of technology! We're really moving forward now!

Then something intrigued me: visual voicemail. Now Apple's talking, I thought to myself as I watched how you can see a list of people who have left you voicemails and listen to them in any order. Nice. Seeing as how I hate checking voicemails, this little feature was certainly alluring.

The iPod

Now we go to the multimedia aspect of the iPhone. After having owned two iPods (both of which came to unsuccessful and untimely ends), I swore off the iPod in its entirety. I also never really liked the iTunes platform, which of course you'll need to put songs on your shiny new iPhone.

The cool thing, though, is that you can watch and even rent movies on your iPhone. You turn the phone horizontally and it offers the choice between full- and widescreen viewing. Very good for the movie buff who actually has the time to go somewhere where they are forced to watch videos on their phone... personally, I couldn't justify getting a phone for video capability when I have a lovely 17" laptop that does rather nicely. But moving on.

iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store

This application is great for people who actually pay for their music through iTunes. For those like me who don't care (at the risk of self-incrimination), it doesn't mean much. You buy songs and albums from iTunes and it downloads straight to your computer. Hey...can you download songs straight from Limewire to your fancy iPhone? Now I would call THAT a revolutionary application.

I've said too much...

Earphones

The iPhone comes with these headphones that allow you to answer a call while you're listening to music, then fades the music back when the call is over. Nice, but it's nothing new. A Bluetooth headset will do the trick.

Keyboard

I cheated a little and skipped right past the Internet (which is arguably the most important part of the phone) because I knew it wasn't going to say anything that I didn't already know. The Internet's faster than the last phone because it's 3G, we know, we know. Being an avid texter, I was interested in seeing how the keyboard was going to work.

The touch keyboard idea is actually kind of cool, but the buttons seem so small and the guy made a lot of typing errors while he was typing. The phone just predicts the words you want to use, sort of like an integrated iTap with a keyboard. As cool as it looked, though, a turnoff was the initial need to use one finger to type instead of two thumbs (my personal favorite). Besides, people these days already get lazy enough with their spelling...do we really need a phone to encourage that? Of course, for all you Japanese buffs out there, the iPhone offers a Japanese character keyboard and letter recognition so you can get those Japanese characters just right.

I, of course, being the common layperson who is only fluent in English and can read some Spanish and understand it when spoken veeerrrryyy slowly, didn't find the Japanese characters to be a huge need, but I'm sure people in Japan are heralding the addition.

Price

Now that I knew the features, it was time to factor in the cost.

With a new two-year contract (with AT&T?? The horror!), the 8GB iPhone is $199 and the 16GB is $299. Not too bad.

For those who cannot upgrade, the cost for the 8GB is $399 and the 16GB is $499. I suppose that's fine for those who want to spend that much money on it.

Now for the contract itself. A voice plan is $39.99 per month, an unlimited texting plan is $20, and an unlimited data plan is $30. So we're at approximately $90 PER MONTH (without taxes, mind you) to be introduced into the wonderful world of... doing everything you could do on a smartphone for a cheaper amount. Hell, my voice and sidekick plan (which includes unlimited texts and data BUNDLED) will cost at most $70 per month once I get into the cycle of paying for my service on a regular basis (which won't be for another two months).

This is exactly why I didn't take up a contract with AT&T when I lost my Treo. They take your money for no reason at all.

My Observations

Is the iPhone worth the hours of waiting in line?

....Meh...in my opinion, no.

But that's just my opinion.

So before you start throwing the tomatoes (none with salmonella, please, that's just cruel), let me say this:

-> I don't hate anyone who has or wants an iPhone and if you want to stand outside braving the elements for hours on end waiting for it, that's all on you. People do it for CDs. You just won't find me sitting outside waiting for anything that's not edible.

-> I'm a Windows fan. Always have been. The Apple platform caused me to lose a word processing competition a year and a half ago and I still haven't forgiven it. Stupid Apple.

-> The iPhone has so many features that it seems featured out. All of the icons like the weather and business and stuff like that seem superfluous at best. They bog down the phone and while some people thing "the more icons, the better", I think that the more icons the slower and the less efficient.

But that's just me.