iPhone in depth: The Ars review

iGoogleplex: Maps and YouTube

Google is a big iPhone partner via two special widgets which bring popular browser-based services directly to the iPhone as widgets. You're already familiar with both Google Maps and YouTube, so we'll focus on the iPhone-specific aspects of these widgets.

Google Maps

Just like Google Maps on a computer, Google Maps on the iPhone allows you to search for businesses or addresses nearby using any number of criteria. "Restaurants near 400 N. Wells Chicago," "Fogo de Chao Chicago," "Starbucks near 60640" all behave as they would on the computer, with pins popping down from the sky into the map. You can then tap on any of these pins to get more information on that business—such as their phone number, web address, or street address—or tell it to give you directions to or from there. Tapping on the web address will load that page in a new tab in Safari, and tapping the phone number will allow you to make a phone call to the business.

Getting directions works the same way. Enter a start and end address (or if you followed the instructions from above to go to a location that you have searched for, one of those fields will already be filled in for you), and you're on your way with step-by-step driving directions. The map will display your start and end points with a purple line on the streets in between, with the actual directions displayed across the top.

Tapping "Start" will begin the directions. It will tell you exactly how far to go on each street and tell you where to turn. When you have completed that step, tapping the forward arrow will animate the map to display the next step, and if you accidentally go too far ahead, you can always tap the back arrow. It's like the poor man's GPS navigation.

What's cool about getting directions is that you can save bookmarks for favorite or common locations. This is helpful when you are consistently starting or ending at the same place (such as your home), so you only have to enter one address when retrieving directions.

Since the iPhone does not currently have a GPS device, it is unable to determine your location. (It also can't triangulate your location based on cell towers; although the carriers are currently required to do so for emergency calls, but none have yet implemented such a feature for customer use as far as we know) This may prove frustrating for those of us (such as Jacqui) who almost never know exactly where we are, but the tool is useful nonetheless.

Google Maps on the iPhone can also display real-time traffic data (for roads that it can get traffic data from, anyway) as well as satellite images. This makes finding specific buildings easier as well as letting you know which highways to avoid before you get there.

Google Maps on the iPhone actually works almost exactly the same way as it does on the BlackBerry. The look of the maps are the same, the functionality is the same, even the directions are the same. The only differences between Google Maps on the iPhone and Google Maps on the BlackBerry is that on the iPhone, there are more animations (pins dropping, animated maps between directions, etc.), and entering addresses looks much prettier. Also, the BlackBerry lacks a location bookmarking feature, although it does remember past addresses that you have entered (as does the iPhone).  Obviously, the iPhone also has touch support for zooming in and out and panning around the map.

YouTube and other Internet-y widgets

YouTube was added as an iPhone "feature" just weeks before launch, at the same time that YouTube started appearing on the Apple TV. Although it may appear as if Apple has created a direct portal to YouTube from the iPhone, that's only partially true. The iPhone does not currently support Flash video, and so YouTube actually re-encodes every single video from YouTube to H.264 video for streaming onto the iPhone and the Apple TV. As of the time of this writing, Apple does not claim to have re-encoded all YouTube videos just yet but hopes to have the full YouTube catalog available by the fall.

Using the YouTube widget is simple to figure out; you can look through a list of favorites, popular videos, recently-watched videos, or search for your own videos. Tapping on a video in the list will bring it up in full, widescreen mode. Video quality is surprisingly good, depending on the quality of the source.

You can share a link to any given YouTube video by tapping the e-mail icon, which will open up a new e-mail message with a link to the YouTube video inside.

This feature is certainly cute and handy when you're bored out of your mind and have already surfed the entire Internet in Safari. However, it's not exactly a major productivity app, and so we wouldn't exactly cry if it went away. We'd be willing to trade YouTube for some of the other nits that we have picked thus far, without a doubt.

Other widgets included on the iPhone that make use of the Internet connection include the Weather widget, Stocks widget, and the Clock widget. These all look and work in the exact same way as they do on the Mac's Dashboard. You can keep track of any number of time zones simultaneously through the world clock, enter all of your own stock symbols to constantly monitor them in the Stock widget, and keep track of the weather forecast for as many cities as you'd like in the Weather widget. Again, they're helpful but not required to have a fulfilling iPhone experience.

Through multiple tests, we were able to get just a hair over four hours of solid Internet use out of the iPhone on both EDGE and WiFi. Apple advertises up to six hours on WiFi and with various specific settings (auto brightness off, for example). We felt that ~4 hours straight was a decent amount of time for the device to last for these activities—not mind-blowing, but not disappointing. Of course, the iPhone is not a full-fledged miniature laptop, and therefore most people won't find themselves surfing for 4+ hours on the iPhone in a single session anyway. On the other hand, none of us would argue if we could squeeze a couple more hours out of that puppy.