The iPhone: 10 Things Apple Did Right, 10 Things They Did Wrong
- The display, the display, the display. Everything looks good on it.
- The menu design: It's simple and clean, and the home screen icons look like so much eye candy.
- Fingertip navigation, zooming and scrolling that's intuitive, effective and fast.
- Video playback that's so good you can tell when you've done a sub-par job of ripping your movies.
- Visual voicemail lets you get to the calls you care about faster.
- Great integrated applications, including Google Maps, YouTube, and a world clock that packs a timer, stopwatch and multiple alarms.
- Cover Flow. It's incredibly fun to choose your music by visually flipping through album art.
- It's tough: Our initial stress tests suggest that the iPhone is more durable than you might expect for such a sleek handset.
- The first Apple music player with a built-in speaker--and it's not half bad for a phone.
- No disconcerting "do not disconnect" messages when syncing with a PC.
10 Things They Did Wrong
- We want our AOL Instant Messaging--and Yahoo and MSN IM clients, too. What about MMS support for sending picture mail?
- No voice recording--and more importantly, no voice dialing support. How are you supposed to use an iPhone with a hands-free car kit?
- It's the most locked-down phone we've ever seen. Not only can you not swap out the AT&T SIM card for one from another network, you can't even swap it out for another AT&T SIM card.
- AT&T is building out its mobile broadband network, but iPhone users are stuck with older EDGE technology--or battery-consuming Wi-Fi.
- You know those great headphones you already own? They won't fit the iPhones headset jack, so your first iPhone accessory will be a bulky, ugly $10 adapter.
- The software keyboard invites typos--but when you're entering passwords there's no way of telling whether you've got them right.
- It's great that the iPhone can reorient pages in Safari, CoverFlow, and the photo album, but why not extend that capability to other apps such as e-mail? Some messages could benefit from a widescreen display. And even when it does reorient, it doesn't always follow through with all features: CoverFlow loses access to the volume slider, for example.
- No support for custom ringtones, surprising in a music phone.
- The camera's rudimentary, with no audio/video or even zoom capability.
- No to-do list support, a basic in most calendar applications.
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