iPhone Review Roundtable
Reviews of the iPhone from the anointed few journalists who got a sneak peek at the device are starting to come in. Since we at PC World don’t have one yet (we’ll be the ones waiting outside the AT&T store on Friday with the “Will Edit for an iPhone” t-shirts), I thought the least we could do is host a sort of virtual roundtable of iPhone reviewers. So here’s a compilation of takes from Newsweek’s Steven Levy, the New York Times’ David Pogue, Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret of the Wall Street Journal and USA Today’s Ed Baig.
Ease of Use
Ed: “.., a breeze to set up and fun to use …”
David: “It’s fast, beautiful, menu-free and dead simple to operate.”
Overall Design
David: “… so sleek and thin, it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese.”
Walt and Katie: “It feels solid and comfortable in the hand …”
On-screen keyboard
David: “Tapping the skinny little virtual keys on the screen is frustrating, especially at first.”
Steven: “Maybe I’m a spaz, but I’m only beginning to get the hang of two-thumb typing [on the virtual keyboard]”
Ed: “Finger-tapping takes getting used to.”
Walt and Katie: “Overall, it works. But the error-correction system didn’t seem as clever as the one on the BlackBerry, and you have to switch to a different keyboard view to insert a period or comma, which is annoying.”
Screen
Ed: “… visible even in direct sun.”
Walt and Katie: “…the way it displays photos, videos and Web pages on its gorgeous screen makes other smart phones look primitive.”
David: “The glass gets smudgy — a sleeve wipes it clean — but it doesn’t scratch easily.
Multi-touch interface
Steven: Using it “was fun, in the same way that switching from an old command-line interface to the Macintosh graphical user interface in the mid-1980s was a kick.”
David: “Sure, it’s eye candy. But it makes the phone fun to use, which is not something you can say about most cellphones.”
Walt and Katie: “… works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.”
The EDGE network
Ed: “pokey”
Walt and Katie: “pokey”
David: “excruciatingly slow”
Steven: “feels like dial-up speed”
As a phone
Everybody loved “visual voice mail,” a visual display of your voice messages that lets you choose which to listen or respond to.
Web Browsing
Steven: “It does the best job yet of compressing the World Wide Web on a palm-size device.”
Walt and Katie: “…best Web browser we have seen on a smart phone …”
Battery Life
Walt and Katie: “excellent … far exceeds the talk time claims of other smart phones …”
Ed: “… it’s a good idea to charge it overnight.”
David: “… you’ll probably wind up recharging about every other day.”
Bottom Line
Walt and Katie: “… despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer.”
Ed: “… iPhone’s splash of a debut is worthy of the attention it is receiving.”
Steven: “… the rare convergence device where things actually converge.”
David: “It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles.”
Source: By Edward N. Albro, PC World
