Life & Style | Gadgets & Tech
Dazzled but disappointed with the iPhone
When news filtered through that an iPhone was in town and ready to be played with I headed over to the Protech store on Shaikh Zayed Road to get my hands on the much vaunted (and in some quarters much maligned) phone.
- By Adam Flinter, Web Editor
- Published: 19:52 July 17, 2007
- As it stands. It's stunning to look at, and huge fun to play with. But look a little deeper and it doesn't appear to be that good as a phone.
- Image Credit:
Ok, first things first.
I'll get the confessions out of the way. I like Mac products. I have an iPod. I've owned iBooks and iMacs in the past five years and I'm probably going to buy a Macbook in the near future.
And while I probably am the ideal target demographic for them, I have to say there can be no doubt amongst anyone that no consumer company can put out a design-led, functional, mass market device like Apple.
So when news filtered through that an iPhone was in town and ready to be played with I headed over to the Protech store on Shaikh Zayed Road to get my hands on the much vaunted (and in some quarters much maligned) phone.
Waiting patiently behind another potential customer, I was like a kid waiting for Christmas. But low and behold. The phone battery was dead.
Fortunately the gods were on my side and the phone was plugged into a handy iBook, so within five minutes I was having my first iPhone experience.
And it is truly a beautiful phone, a perfect 10 on that score.
Gorgeous
But I wouldn't have expected anything else from Apple. When your reputation is staked on aesthetics and intuitive interfaces, it simply had to be gorgeous.
It's not as big as I thought it would be, not too heavy, not too wide. Slim yet curvaceous with a wonderfully inviting and dazzling clear-brite style screen begging to have sticky fingerprints smeared all over it. And of course one…just one button.
Of course, you can literally take it out of the box, charge it up and away you go. No hint of an instruction manual needed. It is that simple.
The touch screen, dialing features, email capability, video clarity, sound and even the much criticised web browsing system (gulfnews.com looked great by the way) all seemed to work as beautifully as they looked. It was almost a joy to use something that features so much attention to detail.
The graphical interface is rich and textured (writing and deleting notes for example is a pretty slick operation) and the multi-touch feature which has been widely talked about is impressive.
Move your fingers apart and your photo gets bigger or you zoom closer into the site you are in. Draw them back in and the picture resizes smaller on your screen.
You can then move the object or site around, making ice skating figures of eight across the screen if you so desire.
Flip the phone sideways and the picture shifts from portrait to landscape in an instant. It's wonderful to watch, and if I'm being honest, I could have played with that functionality for hours alone.
But…and it is a big but…you cannot actually do anything useful with it. It is just a highly impressive and hugely fun novelty function, and while it is great fun, ultimately, it's just a much cooler way of hitting the maximize button and using scroll bars.
It came as a disappointment to me to find that you can't crop or edit your pictures.
Not only that, you can't zoom in when you're using the (what is now a) pretty industry standard 2megapixel camera…or even take video at all.
The last point I found particularly amusing when you consider that Apple have hooked up with web 2.0 behemoths YouTube in the US, knowing full well that no video taken on the iPhone will ever make it onto the site they are plugging so aggressively.
Another problem is that the iPhone doesn't support flash…more than a little odd considering that flash is pretty much standard web kit these days. In fact, there didn't really appear to be too much software on the device, and I'm not sure how much there is on the open market yet either.
I also thought it strange that the flip to widescreen interface didn't work when you try to compose an SMS. Surely a qwerty keyboard would look better in landscape than portrait?
Finally, there is the age old Apple issue of battery. In that there is no removable one, so when your battery dies, so does your iPhone. Or at least you have a lengthy delay if you can get a replacement.
That's a pretty poor show for something with as much usage and as much market appeal as a phone.
On the plus side again. I'm sure this is just a first generation phone and that these kinks will be ironed out in the coming months.
Perhaps by the time it officially hits these shores (and when they add a better camera) in the first quarter of 2008, it will truly be worth the hype.
As it stands. It's stunning to look at, and huge fun to play with. But look a little deeper and it doesn't appear to be that good as a camera phone, especially not for more than Dh2,500.
And while it is entirely subjective, and I woulds advise people to go and make their own minds up. I'm afraid to report that I won't be joining the queues of people slapping their cash onto the table.
Your comments
I was very eager, asking my sister from the States to buy one for me and my husband, as it sounded great when I saw it in The Filipino Channel gadget news. Good thing you are updated as to the new gadgets as I am also one of those gadget addicts. I better wait till the first quarter of next year rather than slap my cash on the table with no much use for me.
Maria
Abu Dhabi,UAE
Posted: July 18, 2007, 11:23
I fully agree. And on top of all that, it has no GPS.
Marco
Dubai,UAE
Posted: July 18, 2007, 10:42
It only goes to show that Apple is getting wiser with monopoly. Just like Microsoft. Vista comes out, everybody lines up, later on everybody complains. So is iPhone, it's just beautiful, that's why everybody lines up, eventually you find something to complain about. Technology never gets better when released, there's always upgrade.
Mark
Dubai,UAE
Posted: July 18, 2007, 09:33
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