Can you recall your first encounter with a computer, and how empowered you felt? That feeling that one device could change your world. If you've yearned for that feeling, get an iPhone.
The iPhone demonstrates Apple 's ingenuity and keen sense of technical design. What the iPhone does right, it does outstandingly, so much so that it will lead you to overlook its considerable shortcomings.
Multi-touch
The first feature that exemplifies the iPhone's excellence: Apple's MultiTouch touchscreen technology. MultiTouch will prove to be a model for touchface interfaces in the future. MultiTouch succeeds because it uses natural movements: a pinching motion for zooming in and out, a flick up or down for fast scrolling, single and double taps. MultiTouch avoids awkward movements.
The onscreen Qwerty keyboard, a concern for sceptics, has its learning curve but it's not unusable. You need to develop a sense of where your finger (skin, not your fingernail) touches the key.
Some of us quickly adapted to the on-screen keyboard, while others will need days to learn the keyboard's nuances. Once mastered, you'll realise the concern was overstated.
The iPhone 3.5-inch screen dazzles. Colour pops on the screen, and the text detail may be some of the best seen compared to similar devices. Skin tones look realistic and smooth in photos and videos, and we didn't notice any ghosting.
In fact, the image quality is so good that you can enjoy a two-hour movie, even if you believe that movies were made for big screens. A commercially-made DVD movie that we ripped to our Mac using Handbrake and formatted as an iPod movie played on the iPhone flawlessly.
iPhone management is done through a USB connection on Mac or Windows (the iPhone is incompatible with 64-bit Windows Vista ) using iTunes . Not only are your iPod files organised in iTunes, but you also determine your Calendar and Address Book settings there, too. The iPhone is compatible with Address Book, iCal under Mac OS X , and Microsoft Entourage on the Mac. On Windows, iPhone works with Microsoft Outlook .
Phone and Internet
Apple touts a web experience on the iPhone without the compromises you usually make with smartphones. In actuality, the iPhone web experience is glorious yet has its own set of compromises. You see web pages as you would on a computer, and text and pictures look spectacular.
