iPhone in depth: The Ars review

Bunt: E-mail and SMS

The iPhone e-mail client is competent, but it shows none of the refinement or awe-factor of Safari on the iPhone. Is that because e-mail is boring, or because Apple has more work to do? Let's find out.

Setup is straightforward: e-mail account info can be entered manually or synced through iTunes. We synced several e-mail accounts via iTunes, including one IMAP-enabled Exchange account and two POP-enabled Gmail accounts. The experience was so seamless that it was almost laughable; we were able to start sending and receiving e-mail almost immediately after purchasing the iPhone without having to enter any settings whatsoever. The only problem we ran into was on Windows, where iTunes failed to interpret the Exchange MAPI settings correctly when it tried to set up IMAP. Changing the outgoing SMTP server settings fixed this.

Manual setup is easy. If you can set up your own e-mail, you can handle the iPhone manual e-mail setup. There are even several presets for common mail servers, such as Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL.

Many half-done features

Using the mail application is not very enjoyable. Viewing individual e-mails is a strangely slow process; click on an item and you see a subject line and header information first, then the iPhone takes another two seconds to load the contents of the e-mail. At first, we thought that the iPhone was reaching out to the mail server to get the contents of the e-mail; that's how slow it is. If you're a heavy BlackBerry e-mail user, you know that any delay greatly slows your progress.

Deleting messages is also a gigantic pain in the butt. You have to either swipe your finger across a message header to bring up a delete button, or you have to enter "edit" mode in the inbox listing and click two additional buttons per message to delete them. We need one-button delete, and we need to be able to delete more than one message at a time. In this spammy-spam world, how can anything less be acceptable?

It gets worse, actually. Deleting these messages just moves them to the trash. If you want to expunge them, you have to delete each one from the trash manually again or wait until the "autodelete" function kicks in. It defaults to "Never," and the most frequent option for emptying the trash is "1 day." Apple needs to give us an option to empty the trash with one click, and we need more frequent options for emptying the trash automatically, too. This is particularly important for keeping IMAP mailboxes in order across multiple connections.

And speaking of automation, users are limited to setting their iPhones to check for e-mail periodically, since push e-mail is not supported aside from Yahoo's mail integration. You can specify manual-only checks, once every five minutes, once every half hour, or once every hour. The more often you have the iPhone check various e-mail servers for mail, the lower your battery life will be, obviously. We chose to have it check once per hour, and manually checked when we needed in between. One thing that we would love would be the ability to set different e-mail accounts to check at different periods of time.

Such account-specific features should also apply to signature support. Like BlackBerrys, the iPhone comes (by default) with its own little "Sent from my iPhone" signature. This can be edited within the iPhone's preferences to say whatever you want. Mine now has my entire Ars e-mail signature, but I kept the iPhone line at the end as a caveat so that anyone reading my e-mails can understand why they might be shorter and more to the point.

The downside to changing the sig to be more your style, however, is that the same sig is used for every single e-mail account on the iPhone. I currently have my standard Ars Technica sig set up on the iPhone, but it ends up being tacked onto every e-mail I send, even from my personal accounts. Mail.app on the Mac allows you to have different signatures for different accounts, and this should be supported on the iPhone as well.

Another half-done oddity about the iPhone in general is that it contains support for Word, Excel, and PDF documents... as read-only. And the only way to get those documents onto your iPhone is to e-mail them to yourself. Reading Word documents is easy, though, and doing so very readable on the iPhone's screen. We found it odd, then, that the iPhone doesn't let you actually edit these documents, since doing so would seem simple and make perfect sense.

A minor, yet helpful feature that we'd like to see in future versions of the iPhone software would be for Growl-like e-mail alerts to pop up on top of other applications when an e-mail comes in. This happens when you receive a new SMS (which we will talk about when we get into the phone stuff later), along with the new SMS sound and a short vibration. Currently, when a new e-mail (or three, or ten) comes in, and you're in another application, it only rings the new mail sound and vibrates. You have no idea how many e-mails you've received, who they're from, or what accounts they are on. A simple, semi-transparent pop-up, like the one provided for SMS messages, displaying even just the subject line and who it's from would be a nice addition to the mail interface, along with a button asking whether you want to view or ignore it.

Spam ahoy

The first two things that anyone who uses e-mail a lot will notice is that the iPhone's mail client contains absolutely no spam filtering whatsoever, and that there is no way to mass-delete e-mails. If you have e-mail accounts that get a lot of spam—even if your mail client on your computer catches most of it, as ours do—you are going to get every single one of those in your iPhone's inbox. And when they come flowing in en masse, you have to delete every single one of them one by one.

Building on our earlier complaints about the lack of a mass-deletion option, there is also no way to mark a handful (or all) e-mails as read in a particular inbox. This can be infuriating upon first sync with the e-mail server when you have hundreds of messages pouring in as "new." More attention to e-mail management features is badly needed on the iPhone.

Exchange support is a joke

The iPhone's mail client does not currently have "real" Exchange support; it can be used with Exchange servers that have IMAP enabled, but it does not support MAPI or RPC or HTTP. Apple says that it supports Exchange, but it supports Exchange in the same way that your Honda Civic supports off-roading. It's technically possible, but you're not going to enjoy it.

The lame Exchange support comes as a huge frustration to throngs of business users who want to use the iPhone as a replacement BlackBerry, push e-mail and all. This is a feature that is rumored to be coming via software update in the future, but for now, Exchange users who want to get on the iPhone are stuck with IMAP, which is workable only if you are not also using the standard MAPI client through Outlook. If you are, your inbox will quickly be out of sync because of the way IMAP and MAPI handle deleted e-mails, along with other reasons.  We can't stress this enough: mixing IMAP and MAPI will just leave you sad. Messages you delete using the iPhone's IMAP connection will not be removed from Exchange, even if you empty the trash and sync again.

In sum, Mail is a bunt, but the batter reaches first.

We have a lot of complaints about the mail app on the iPhone as we feel that it was ignored, perhaps to the benefit of Safari or the touchscreen implementation itself. Yet, don't get us wrong: the e-mail client is decent, it doesn't crash, and you can send and receive POP and IMAP e-mail easily. It's not going to blow you away though, and it comes nowhere near the BlackBerry e-mail experience, where the BlackBerry and your primary inbox are wedded more or less flawlessly.

SMS on the iPhone

If mail was a complete letdown, SMS support is nothing short of amazing. Unlike pretty much every other phone on earth, the SMS interface on the iPhone is set up conversation-style, complete with colored chat bubbles like Apple's chat program on the Mac, iChat. Instead of showing a giant list of incoming SMSes and a separate list of outgoing SMSes, with multiple conversations mixed together, the iPhone displays each conversation as just that: a back-and-forth conversation that can be read over and actually understood. This makes the SMS experience infinitely better.

The iPhone keeps a log of all the conversations you have had (or are currently having), separated by conversation partner. You can clear the chat history at any time by tapping the "Clear" button at the top of your conversation.

Clearly, SMS is set up in a way that makes it as visually pleasing and usable as possible, which we love. However, keep in mind that AT&T's default rate plans for the iPhone don't include unlimited SMS messages: they include 200 messages per month unless you add an extra-SMS plan. Chatting this way can easily rack up your SMS charges if you're not careful.

On the negative side, the iPhone cannot send SMSes to multiple recipients at a time (also known as the "mass SMS" among friends of ours), and does not currently have MMS support; that is, you can't text-message your friends a photo or movie, for example, and they can't send you one either. If someone tries to send you one, the iPhone displays a SMS saying that the person tried to send you an MMS and that it can be viewed online. This is quite a puzzling omission for the iPhone, and we can only hope that it's added in the future.

The natural assumption, too, is that SMS is meant to be used as a chat client on the iPhone, which is both good and bad. Bad, because it draws attention to the fact that the iPhone does not currently have any sort of non-SMS chat client. There have been some iPhone-compatible web apps written that allow people to log into their AIM accounts and have chat sessions with friends, but currently there is no native iPhone application that supports IM. Even the lamest of phones (such as the RAZR) have an IM client, and so many people view this as a severe lack in functionality. As per the usual pattern, the rumormongers have said that iChat (Apple's chat client on the Mac) support will be coming very soon to the iPhone, and we feel confident that it will. However, for now, the lack of an IM client is disappointing.