The iPhone as a Cell Phone

The iPhone's 2 megapixel camera can take photos in the vertical or horizontal (wide screen) position. There is no flash. Like many standalone digital cameras, white balance is not all that great indoors and images are noisy. They are better outdoors. The 3 megapixel camera in my Blackberry Pearl is better all around. When viewing photos they are reoriented depending on whether you are holding the iPhone in a horizontal or vertical position. Three out of ten pictures I took suffered from poor auto-focusing, though I held the camera in both hands and pressed the "shutter release" gently.

Apple offers no information about the capacity of the built-in battery. Yes, another built- in iBattery with an expected 300 times recharge life. And I still haven't figured out how to open the case. This also has consequences for those who might want to replace the iPhone's SIM card. There is talk of a hack that opens the card for use with other carriers such as T-Mobile in the USA, but you have to get inside the case to change the SIM card.

Making a call is as simple as pressing the graphical green button with a phone icon on the Home screen. This brings up a screen with five icons across the bottom. The first four icons can be used to generate a call; the last one gives you access to your voice mail.

Favorites: A list of contacts you call most frequently; you create this list yourself Recents: A list of your most recent calls, which is nice for re-calling a number Contacts: Your full list of contacts from which you pick a number to call Keypad: Brings up a numeric keypad for touch dialling of a phone number Voice Mail: Access to the iPhone's unique voice mail service that shows information about the message and allows you to hear the message without calling your voice mailbox

Answering a call is also simple. If the phone is not in sleep mode, just press the graphical Answer key to answer or press the red Decline key to transfer the call to your voice mail. If the phone is in idle mode, when it becomes active slide the slider to the right to unlock the phone and you are connected to your caller. A large red graphical End Call button is displayed; use it to hang up at any time.

Sound quality ran from good to just a little tinny. This was especially the case when listening with the iPhone's speaker. Using a Bluetooth earphone yielded very good sound. In all the time I used the phone it never dropped a call, a testament to the AT&T network near my office and to the amazing five bar signal inside my office. My Blackberry Pearl on the same network usually gets around three bars. Hooray for whatever Apple did to maximize the signal and prayers that it doesn't give us all some new form of Cancer. Just kidding.

Setting up voice mail was simpler than with most systems. You record your greeting right on the phone and it's sent to AT&T to be used when you get a call. The iPhone features something called "visual voice mail." This is great. You see a list of your voice messages. If the call is from someone in your contacts, their name is shown with the call notification. You can visually select any message you want to listen to by selecting it with your finger and then pressing the play symbol that appears on the message.

The iPhone as an iPod

Apple owns the multimedia player market with the iPod and they've integrated full iPod functionality into the iPhone, though moving from iPod-men-to-iPod-menu sometimes requires using a slightly different interface. To get to your music and videos, you press the orange button with an iPod icon on it on the Home screen. There are five icons on the main iPod screen.

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