So what do you get for a rather hefty cash price when the iPhone hits the UK pre Christmas? The 115mm tall by 61mm wide by 12mm deep mobile is a rather chunky size on paper but doesn't feel that bad in the hand, it is a tad heavy at 135 grams and is a more smartphone sized than mobile. The materials chosen by Apple do give the impression that you are getting value for money. The screen is the main selling point and the fact its glass as opposed to plastic makes it feel great under the finger which is essential given the rather unique interface of the iPhone.

The screen is a whopper at 3.5" and has a resolution of 480x320 pixels, but again the paper only tells half the story, what you get is a vivid and colourful screen which lights up from blackness and causes an amount of wonder a bit like the first time you saw one of those ceramic hobbs. Where Apple really makes its mark with the iPhone is the menus, they have ripped up the book on mobile menus written by Nokia and Sony Ericsson, in fact we're not sure they even had a copy. Instead you will find a far more Mac / iPod like interface with icons that do what they look like and great animations. Its easy to pull a crowd with an iPhone and we think even possible to pull the ladies (at least if you get one early in the UK).

Using your finger on the glass screen you can navigate through menus simply and quickly, in fact you can even scroll down lists with an amount of realism which has a cleaver resistance or bounce as you move the list. Its just an example of how much effort has gone into the user experience and ownership of the Apple iPhone. Sadly this would all count for nothing if the unit doesn't work in its basic mode as a mobile.

So we devised a cunning set of tests where we used it as a work office phone and tried to ignore that fact that we had an 8gb iPod in out pockets too. So day one and a fully charged iPhone and the work awaits, it wasn't long before the groovy ring tone we had selected started loud and clear, and the on screen talk button appears for you to accept the call. Our first chat while brief was clear and without problems, we did worry about the old cheek pushing buttons problem but this didn't seem to happen.

Within 30 minutes we needed to make out first iPhone call and so decided to use the contacts and this is where our first little issue appeared. While the list scroll is very beautiful it can be a little tiring to scroll through long lists as a finger drag only moves you so far down the list and there is no way to go to end or beginning. There is a way to narrow down he choices by first letter so we guess there is a workaround, but was this the first sign of not understanding a mobile?

Anyhow name selected we quickly placed another clear and workman like call, in fact the mornings calls progressed well and we only got a few knowing glances from people eyeing the iPhone. Our real issue with the first morning is that the iPhone is that little bit bigger (certainly not thick) but wide and tall and also heavier than many standard mobiles. For us used to a smartphone like and N95 or Treo that's a non issue but we wonder how many iPhone buyers will be quite prepared for the lump it creates in your trousers!

Ok so midday on our first day and our techy sense were tingling like mad and so we had to test out the other connectivity option on the iPhone, namely WiFi 802.11b/g and Bluetooth 2.0. The first WiFi tests went well with us easily connecting the Apple mobile to our office network and opening the bundled safari browser to view web pages, the large screen makes browsing good and easy too. We did note that sites reliant of flash or java do not work well as neither are currently supported by Apple in this phone. Again Bluetooth worked fine and the 2.0 standard leaves the way open for other BT uses as Apple enables them with further firmware revisions. But for now no A2DP so no stereo audio via Bluetooth, shame.

The let down in connectivity is the support for 3G or the lack of it, instead we get Edge, that may have been fine in 2001 but not now and the download times are frankly painful making mobile web viewing a terrible WAP like experience, its like stepping back in time. Apple promise to do something about this and we'd strongly suggest they get it sorted at support 3G before the UK launch or a lot of their new customers could get a nasty and slow surprise.

The iPhone does support a raft of email options including Microsoft's exchange and IMAP and POP3 services as you may expect, it also works with Push-IMAP which means Yahoo users can get a blackberry like experience with pushed rather than pulled emails. So by mid afternoon we had email sync running over the office WiFi network (god knows we wouldn't want to try EDGE) and were happily browsing the web too. Sadly no funky applications like Skype although these are bound to appear in time especially with Apples plugin architecture and die hard fans.

The iPhone runs on a version of OSX called Darwin and uses either 4gb or 8gb flash memory (mostly for audio and video storage) it supports quad band calling, so GSM 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 making it a well travelled phone. One nifty feature we found is that the phone can tell which way up it is, so if you flip it from landscape to portrait it re orientates the screen without you needing to push anything, apple call this the accelerometer. We only discovered that the same motion / proximity sensor switches off the screen when u answer a call hence we didn't manage to press it while in a call, cool eh?

So end of day one and the battery had taken a fair pounding with a little over 1 hours calls clocked and a fair bit of playtime too, throw in some web browsing and a smidgen of MP3 playback and we had about half the battery left. Apple claim 8hrs talk time and 250 hours on standby, but use as an iPod will kill it in 24hrs and goodness only knows how long it would last with WiFi switched on, we guess less than the talk time!

Day 2 and the battery indicator hadn't moved, suspicious we thought, sure enough first call and it dropped but not by a scary amount. We decided to leave Bluetooth on for the day and use with a Motorola headset as it was a day on the road for the Lordpercy team. So into our first meeting and time to put the iPhone on mute, guess what Apple have taken a cool feature from the Palm boys and have a ringer mute switch on the side, we only wish more people would do this as opposed to having to change profiles and then forget you did it. The vibrate mode was put to the test and we did find it less than vigorous and easily missed say in a nightclub where the vibrate is most useful.

Post meeting, well actually while still in the tail end we gave in to the temptation to play with the iPod features. Lets not forget this is what convergence really looks like, this isn't a mobile with MP3 playback from an MMC card tacked on, this is a full iPod Nano that is also a mobile. iPod users will find it all very familiar expect no click wheel but instead the scroll list. What we loved about the iPod section was the way the artwork works, you can really leaf through you music by album cover and choose which you want to listen too, something you can't easily do on a 5G iPod. Then all those 5G iPod feature are there in spades, video yes, Podcasts yes, iTunes yes, in fact you do wonder why you'd buy an iPod and Mobile phone and that's the rub why take 2 bottles into the shower as the shampoo advert used to say.

Sadly after 2 days (and now a fairly flat battery) the reason was clear, cost!  When Apple bring the iPhone to blighty (yes 6 months behind again) it looks like being mighty expensive. Consider that the Apple iPhone is in fact an 8gb iPod Nano (£169) plus a smartphone then a sim free price of £600+ seems highly likely and a with contract price north of £200, that is for the lucky chosen network.

48 hours with the iPhone and we have to say yes it does live up to the hype, Apple have done a remarkable job in joining a high quality MP3 player with a phone. Yes there are niggles over 3G support and battery life and the user interface may not suit all but the biggest risk to the iPhone success in the UK is pricing and availability. Oh and of course the customary major fault which Apple get lots of publicity from and then manages to fix!

Published - 26/07/2007

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