iPhone in depth: The Ars review

iPhone as... phone!

It's rumored that some people bought the iPhone to actually make calls to other living beings. As such, we need to look at the iPhone as a phone. Our verdict: it's good, but not great. It's certainly better than average.

Making calls

Here's a quick tour of the basic features: in order to dial a number that's not in your contacts list, all you have to do is hit the Phone button from the home screen and make sure that you are on the keypad, then dial away:

To call a contact, tap Contacts once you are in Phone mode, and you will see a list of contacts to choose from. Tapping that contact will show you all of his or her information, and if there are multiple phone numbers to choose from (say one for work, one for home, and one for their mobile phone), you will be able to choose which number to call. Tapping that number will automatically call that contact.

You can also keep a list of phone Favorites. Here, you can store whoever you want: people you call the most, people you have a crush on, whatever. Adding a new Favorite is easy; all you have to do is tap the "+" sign on the top right of the Favorites screen, which brings you to your full Contacts list. Select a contact and a number for that contact to add to the Favorites, and you're done.

While on a call, you can do a number of things, such as swap calls (if you have more than one person on the line), merge calls (so that you can have a conference call), mute, switch back to the keypad, go to speakerphone, and view your contacts. You can also go back to the iPhone's home screen and do any number of non-phone activities while on the phone, although this means that you should be conducting the phone-call part of your multitasking adventure over a headset of some sort. Regarding the conference call features: you can conference in up to five people at once.

One of the major omissions is the lack of voice dialing. This is a feature that people either use all the time or don't care for whatsoever, but the "use all the time" people are definitely going to be annoyed. So much for making hands-free phone calls while driving!

Call quality

Call quality of the iPhone over AT&T appeared to be "okay" from both ends: not great, but not terrible. Although no one had any particular complaints, we weren't writing home to mom and dad either. At times, we felt that the volume was a bit low even while maxed out, however. This can prove frustrating in louder environments; we would like for the max volume to be louder.

The speakerphone volume was the same: tolerable, but quiet. If you attempt to use the speakerphone to conduct a call in anything but a quiet room or office, doing so will be irritating. The quietness of the speakerphone in phone mode is somewhat puzzling, since playing music or videos through that same speaker is significantly louder. This is a major downside for some who use the speakerphone a lot, and so we can only hope that Apple does something to remedy the volume issue in future iterations of the iPhone.

Visual voicemail

Visual voicemail is a new feature introduced by AT&T and Apple with the iPhone that currently only "works" over AT&T's network. Instead of requiring the user to dial up the carrier's voicemail number and listen to his or her voicemails in the order that they were received, visual voicemail lists each message out in visual format on the iPhone, almost like e-mail. It displays who the voicemail is from (and if it doesn't recognize the number, it will analyze the area code and tell you what geographical area it's from, which is helpful), and the user can tap whichever one in the list that he or she wants, no matter its position in the list. When the voicemail is playing, the user can pause it, scrub back and forth in the message, or skip.

The way it works is actually not as magical as AT&T might like you to believe, although the technology is still AT&T-specific. The iPhone actually downloads sound clips of the voicemail messages off of AT&T's server, presumably over EDGE, and stores them in temporary files on the iPhone's flash storage. This allows the iPhone user to select messages to listen to out of order, because all he or she is doing is listening to an audio file. This is also what enables the user to scrub with the touchscreen and listen to different parts of the message. It's a nifty bit of technology, but really only required AT&T's voicemail servers to tell the iPhone when to download a new message, and then the iPhone takes care of the rest. In our tests, visual voicemail worked as advertised,  and we had no trouble with it. It is, however, a feature that we would be more than willing to sacrifice if we had the opportunity to use an unlocked iPhone on another network. That said, Ken believes that this is a very significant development in the world of voicemail, and he hopes and prays that this becomes standard everywhere.

More volume concerns

We've only hinted at it so far, but we have one very major complaint with the iPhone as a phone/SMS device: the volume of the alerts. There are several problems here, wrapped into one overall stinker:

• You can only change the sound for the actual phone ring itself; the
  sounds for SMS alerts, e-mail alerts, and almost any other type of alert (aside
  from alarm clock) are preset and unchangeable.

• You cannot currently use your own ringtone for the phone ring; you must
  select from what Apple gives you by default. You can't even buy ringtones from
  Apple or AT&T. Again, this is rumored to change in the near future.

• The large majority of the available ringtones, while audibly pleasing,
  are far too quiet at maximum volume.

Let's talk about that last one for a moment. Each available ringtone is not created equally, and they ring (no pun intended) over other background noise differently. Almost every single one of them is extremely quiet when the ring volume is maxed and can easily be missed while merely going about your business in daily life. The volume seems suitable when playing in a quiet room, but even doing so much as entering your car and putting on the radio can provide enough noise to blare out your ringer when you get a call. This goes doubly so if you go to a bar, restaurant, or club—you may as well not bring your phone at all, because no one will ever be able to get ahold of you—or if you are even walking down a busy street, riding a train or bus, or even just in another room of the apartment or house. What is the point of having the iPhone carry phone functionalities if you're missing calls over half of the time?

These are not made-up scenarios, either. During the entire time we had our iPhones to test, we missed calls in nearly every scenario possible. As an example, while driving our own car with the iPhone sitting on the dashboard in plain view with the car radio on moderately loudly, we missed two phone calls with the ringer on Marimba and the volume on max. We found that the only available ringtone that is loud enough to be heard in most scenarios is the "Old Phone" ringer, and we've found that many other iPhone users in the wild agree. The overall ringer volume is way, way too quiet.

Even worse (if that's possible) is the max volume on the SMS/e-mail alerts. They are virtually inaudible altogether if you're not in a completely quiet room, even when you are listening carefully for them. In a moderately populated bar, restaurant, street corner, or office building, we would go so far as to say there's no chance in hell that you will ever hear an SMS come in. And forget ever hearing it from another room if you're relaxing at home and your iPhone isn't directly in front of your face. Again, while some of you may not "get" SMS and don't care about this, this truly is a serious problem for those of us who rely on it. We communicate with friends and family members while on the go almost exclusively via SMS at times, and without holding the phone in your hand so that you can feel the vibrations, you will truly miss lots and lots of messages.

 

The fact of the matter is that the RAZR's volume can be set to "offensively loud" when necessary, although it's rarely needed. A volume of 4 out of 7 bars on the RAZR is still plenty loud enough to hear from buried within a bag or pocket in any public setting or from across the apartment. A maximum volume on the iPhone in the same scenario is the equivalent of being set to silent.

All of that said, we found the vibration on the iPhone to be very strong. As we mentioned above, you're more likely to hear it vibrate (if sitting on a table) than the audio alert for e-mail or SMS, and it's definitely strong enough to let you know you're getting a call, e-mail, or SMS in your pocket. And depending on where you put it in your bag (Jacqui puts her phone in the back pocket on her messenger bag so that it's up against her body), you might even be able to feel it that way too. Overall, our review team felt that the vibration on the iPhone was stronger than most other devices that we had used.

When using the iPhone as a phone, we got just a hair under 6 hours straight of voice time (5 hours and 52 minutes, to be specific). We did this while WiFi was turned on and everything was going on in the background as usual because we believe that this is how most people will use their iPhones. Apple advertises up to 8 hours of battery life while using the iPhone for voice calls with WiFi off; however, we are satisfied with the results in this area.