iPhone in depth: The Ars review

General usage

The iPhone home screen is where you can find everything you'll need (and a few things you won't) to make use of the iPhone's functionality. Any one of the icons can be tapped with your fingertip to access that particular function, and you can return to the home screen at any time by pressing the one and only button on the front of the iPhone. The four main buttons across the bottom of the screen represent what Apple considers to be the phone's main functionalities: phone, mail, Safari (web browsing), and iPod.

By returning to the home screen in the middle of doing something else (say, checking e-mail or loading a web page), you are not "quitting" out of that application. The iPhone allows you to multitask and do multiple things at once, so if you fire up a song on the iPod, you can return to the home screen and check some e-mail, go load a few web pages in Safari and, while those are loading, go back and make a phone call. The iPhone always saves whatever you were doing in each separate application, and that's what will come up by default when you return to that app.

This functionality can both be annoying and a godsend, depending on what you were expecting when you went to a specific e-mail account, returned to the home screen, and then tapped "mail" again. Some people would rather return to the main mail screen with multiple accounts listed, while others like being taken back to exactly the same spot they left it at. This is a matter of personal preference.

Every aspect of the iPhone is done with what some of us describe as "gratuitous animation," that is, practically every single thing that happens on the iPhone is animated in some way. Things don't just pop up; they slide in. When deleting a note, the little trash can opens, and the note swooshes into it. The home screen icons scatter in and out of the screen. This may sound annoying in description, but it looks great and makes the phone's OS appear to be extremely polished. We didn't find any of the animations getting in our way of getting things done, except Ken did complain that the Mail delete "swoosh" got old after he saw it five times, and that he'd rather be able to delete things faster. Check out our video of the Notes application (which we discuss later) and pay attention to all the pretty animations.

One thing we noticed about the iPhone in general is that it gets pretty warm after long periods of use. While most people won't typically find themselves using the iPhone to browse the Internet for several hours at a time in a single stretch, doing so will most definitely heat the little bugger up. If you don't notice the heat while holding it in your hands, you will when you get a phone call and end up holding the equivalent of a tiny MacBook up to your ear. It's not warm enough to cause physical pain by any means, but it's certainly warm enough to notice. Based on intermittent everyday use, however, the iPhone never really gets the opportunity to warm up that much before going back into standby mode.

Restoring

While annoying and inconvenient to have to do this, Apple apparently anticipated that such a thing would be inevitable at some point and made re-syncing as simple as possible. When restoring, we made sure to sync everything with the computer before the restore, and once the computer had restored the iPhone's settings as new, it asked us whether we wanted to set up the iPhone as a new phone or restore to the previously-synced profile.

When you restore your iPhone to a previously-synced profile, everything is restored: all of your iPhone settings, everything you had ever synced with it, and even your full SMS conversations and call logs. Even if you get a brand new iPhone, we believe you would be able to "restore" all of your information to it as if it was the one you were using all along. This does help to calm some fears about having to exchange broken iPhones and/or wait for erased ones to come back from repair.

Settings

The iPhone's settings section lets you tweak all sorts of things related to the WiFi network, airplane mode, sounds, brightness, wallpaper, mail, phone, Safari, iPod, photos, and more. These are best demonstrated with photos, so we'll just let you have a look.

Screen sensor and Accelerometer

The iPhone has an ambient light sensor built into it, too, so that the brightness of the device automatically adjusts to what it thinks is appropriate based on its surroundings. In our tests, it worked very well, and we never felt that the iPhone had selected a brightness that was too high or low for the situation at hand. However, for control freaks, the ambient light sensor can be turned off via the iPhone's settings, and the brightness of the screen can be controlled manually.

It won't change to landscape mode and back under all circumstances; you have to be holding it at the correct angle, or else the iPhone ignores you. Holding it completely flat (parallel to the ground) is a surefire way to make sure that the accelerometer won't work, for example. Very occasionally, too, it seems to think that you want to go into landscape mode when you don't, although this is not a common problem in our experience. The accelerometer in our Canon SD450 does the same thing but more often, so it seems to be just a matter of getting used to handling the device. It's well worth it, in our opinion.

The SIM card

The SIM card is accessible through the slot on the top of the iPhone and can be popped out with the help of a paperclip or safety pin. The SIM itself, once activated with AT&T, can be used in other AT&T-compatible phones, but the iPhone cannot be used as a phone without a SIM. It can, however, be used as an iPod and a WiFi Internet device without a SIM. The iPhone is currently locked to the AT&T network in the US, and so SIM cards from other GSM carriers, such as T-Mobile, will not work in the iPhone. In our tests, we inserted a T-Mobile SIM into the iPhone and it merely told us "Incompatible SIM." There are multiple efforts under way to unlock the iPhone from AT&T.