Muted Mania for the iPhone 3G Review
Posted on: Thursday, 10 July 2008, 12:00 CDT
By David Pogue
More than a year ago, much of the tech-savvy world was swept by iPhone mania. U.S. television news coverage was nonstop. Hard-core fans camped out to be the first in line to make a purchase. Bloggers referred to the new Apple product as the "Jesus phone."
The phone itself was a stunning black slab of glass: a cellphone, a music and video player and the best pocket Internet terminal the world had ever seen. The huge, bright, touch-sensitive screen made it addictive fun to rotate, page through or magnify your photos, videos and Web pages.
Today, the iPhone is in the hands of six million people, clumsy touch-screen lookalikes from rival phone makers line the shelves and a Google search for iPhone lists about 200 million results.
Friday is the iPhone's second coming.
But when the iPhone 3G goes on sale in AT&T and Apple stores, iPhone mania will be considerably more muted. That's partly because the mystery is gone, partly because the AT&T service costs more, and partly because there are not many new features in what Apple is calling the iPhone 3G.
The new name hints at the biggest change: this iPhone can bring you the Internet much faster. It can exploit AT&T's third- generation cellular network, which brings you Web pages in less than half the time it took on the old iPhone. As a handy bonus, 3G means that you can talk on the iPhone and surf the Internet simultaneously, which you could not do before.
There is, however, a catch: You don't get that speed or those features unless you're in one of AT&T's 3G network areas, and there are not many of those. (Tip: Whenever you're outside of a 3G area, turning off the iPhone's 3G circuitry doubles the battery's talk time, to 10 hours from 5.)
AT&T hastens to note that its 3G coverage will expand, and also that it will get even faster over time. The 3G feature is a much bigger deal in the 70 other countries where the iPhone will soon be available because 3G access is much more common.
Apple planned to offer the new phone starting Friday in conjunction with Vodafone in Australia, Italy, New Zealand and Portugal. It was to be sold on the same date through the Orange network in Austria, France, Portugal and Switzerland. In Japan, the iPhone will be sold via Softbank.
In Hong Kong, Three of Hutchison Telecom will offer an unlocked iPhone for 4,680 Hong Kong dollars, or $600, but customers must sign up for a two-year contract, with the cheapest monthly plan costing 188 dollars.
A second major change is the iPhone's price: $200 for the 8- gigabyte model, $300 for the 16-gig. Those are terrific prices for a machine with so much sophistication, utility and power; a year ago, an 8-gig iPhone would have cost $600. But the iPhone 3G is not really, as Apple's Web site puts it, "half the price." The basic AT&T plan - unlimited Internet and 450 minutes of calling - now costs $70 a month instead of $60, plus taxes and fees, and comes with no text messages instead of 200. By the end of a two-year U.S. contract, the iPhone 3G will have cost more than the old iPhone, not less.
The third improvement is audio quality, which has taken a gigantic step forward. You sound crystal-clear to your callers, and they sound crystal-clear to you. In fact, very few cellphones sound this good.
The other improvements are smaller, but welcome. For example, the new iPhone feels even better in your hand, thanks to a gracefully curved, shiny plastic back. It also has a standard headphone jack - hallelujah! - so no clunky adapter is required for your favorite non- Apple headphones. The power adapter has been shrunk, so it doesn't hog an extra spot on your power strip.
The new iPhone has a true global positioning system now, too, in addition to the fake GPS of its predecessor. Ingenious sensors show your location on a map by analyzing nearby cellphone towers and Wi- Fi hot spots. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do with the GPS. According to Apple, the iPhone's GPS antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a car's unit, for example.
Instead, all it can do at this point is to track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads on the map. The metal of a car, or the buildings of New York City, are often enough to block the iPhone's view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.
There are lots of small software improvements. The four-function calculator now turns into a scientific calculator when you rotate the phone 90 degrees. There's an address-book Search box, parental controls and instant language switching. That feature is made possible by the on-screen keyboard, whose keys change to reflect the language you have selected.
Note, though, that these software tweaks are not iPhone 3G features. They are part of the free software upgrade called iPhone 2.0. And it is available to the six million original iPhones, starting Friday. Even iPod Touch owners can get this upgrade, for $10.
Unfortunately, most of the standard cellphone features missing from the first iPhone are still missing. There's still no voice dialing, video recording, copy-and-paste, memory-card slot, Bluetooth stereo audio or phone-to-phone photos. And when the battery needs replacement after a couple of years, you'll still have to pay Apple $86 for a replacement.
Plenty of Appleholics have expressed dismay at how little the phone has changed. They had raised their hopes for the second- generation iPhone: video phone calls! iPhone nano! 3G hovercraft!
But there is one towering tsunami of a feature that may well shut them up for a while. It's the iPhone App Store: a central, complete, drop-dead simple online catalogue of new programs for the iPhone. Hundreds will be available when the store opens Friday, with thousands to follow. You browse, download and install new programs directly on the iPhone; they don't have to be transferred from a computer, and you don't have to hack the phone to use them. Most programs will be free or inexpensive.
Apple has demonstrated 16 of these programs that make use of the device's orientation, light, and proximity sensors and other high- tech components, including an instant message program, an eBay auction tracker, medical references and a touch-sensitive musical keyboard.
The store will also contain iCall, which gives you free phone calls when you're in a Wi-Fi hot spot. Another program, called G- Park, exploits GPS to help you find where you parked. Yet another, Urbanspoon, is described as a cross between a Magic 8 Ball and a slot machine: You shake the phone, and it randomly displays the name of a good restaurant nearby, using the iPhone's GPS and motion sensor at once.
Above all, the iPhone is about to become a premiere hand-held game machine. The games revealed so far feature smooth 3-D graphics and tilt control; in one driving simulator, you turn the iPhone itself like a steering wheel, and your 3-D car on the screen banks accordingly.
In short, the iPhone is going to be far more useful. And the best part is that the App Store is also available to the six million original iPhones and the iPod Touch. So the iPhone 3G is a nice upgrade. It more than keeps pace with advancing technology, and, thanks to its new ability to work with corporate systems like Microsoft Exchange and ActiveSync, it might even begin to nip at the heels of the BlackBerry in the business world.
But it is not so much better that all those original iPhone owners will need to upgrade. Indeed, the really important development is the iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store, neither of which requires buying a new iPhone. That twist may come as a refreshing surprise to planned-obsolescence conspiracy theorists and all those folks who stood in lines last year.
Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.
(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: International Herald Tribune
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