iPhone Revisited: A Week Later, Has The Polish Come Off?

After More Than A Week With The IPhone

The honeymoon is over between the iPhone and me. I’ve had lots of time to work and play with the thing and, while I’m still quite happy with it and plan to keep it, I have discovered a few problems, one pretty serious, since the original review. I’ve also gathered much new information that I want to give you. So, let’s move on.

Hardware

The Sensors

Much has been said about the iPhone’s three sensors.

Accelerometer - switches the screen orientation between portrait and landscape Proximity Sensor - turns off the display when raising the iPhone to your ear Ambient Light Sensor - increases display brightness when there is more light ; decreases it when there is less light

The accelerometer is obviously inside the iPhone, but where are the other two ? I use that black rubber skin with my iPhone that I showed you in my first look at the device. The skin covers everything but the front of the phone. It has little cutouts for the left and top switches, the 30-pin connector and speakers on the bottom, as well as the topside headphone jack and the rear camera lens. I worried that the skin would cover the proximity and ambient light sensors.

Nope. Both sensors are behind the display. The proximity sensor only works when the iPhone is in phone mode. I talk more about that in the next section. The ambient light sensor works all the time. However, you can turn it off to set display brightness to a fixed level. That can help save battery power.

The CPU, Etc.

As I speculated in my first review of the iPhone, we all now know that the iPhone’s CPU is made by Samsung. It also appears that Samsung is responsible for the device’s memory chips.