Apple iPhone UK model

Given the blanket coverage bestowed upon it since the 9th November launch, you’re probably sick to the back teeth of the iPhone by now. But whatever you think about Apple’s latest gadget, you have to admit that it must be something special to have garnered quite so much media attention.

After using a UK model on the O2 network for a week, the fact of the matter is that…. yes, the iPhone is something special. That’s not to say it isn’t without it’s faults, but it’s perhaps the best smartphone we’ve ever reviewed, but not for the reasons you might think.

The single overriding reason for the unqualified success of the iPhone as a smartphone is that it just 'works'. When ascribed to any other manufacturer’s best handheld effort, “easy to use” presupposes that the user is already familiar with such PC-centric ideas as clicking, dragging, opening menus and so on, and that the smartphone in question merely presents such elements in an readily accessible way.

The problem is that while these conceptual constructs work well when displayed on a large screen and used with a mouse and full-size keyboard, they tend to be a wholly inadequate way of interacting with a smartphone. So, while every mobile operating system from Windows Mobile to Symbian vainly struggles to deliver a handheld analogue to the Windows Desktop, Apple has had the good sense to approach the problem from a different perspective. As a result, the iPhone is so simple and intuitive to use that once you’ve used it for even a few minutes, you have to wonder what the hell everyone else has been playing at for all these years.

This being Apple, the stunning industrial design is the first thing to strike you about the iPhone and it’s a device that feels as good as it looks. Like the near-identical iPod Touch, the iPhone has a sleek aluminium case that feels  satisfyingly solid and the blank front surface neatly sidesteps the mild technophobia that other button-bedecked handsets can induce. The single button on the front of the case turns the iPhone on and almost all of its other functions are accessed via icons on the wonderfully vibrant screen.

The screen is glass rather than plastic, and the feel of an unyielding surface under a fingertip is far superior to the flexible plastic films used by other touch-screens. And a fingertip is the only way to control the iPhone – it won’t respond to anything else. Fortunately, the interface has been sympathetically designed to work perfectly with a fleshy digit and the innovative multi-touch technology that underpins it is remarkably accurate at determining what you’re touching.

The screen does pick up greasy marks like a magnet attracts iron filings, but that just provides an excuse to give the screen a bit of a polish (and yes, there is a cloth in the box). A complete absence of such familiar on-screen paraphernalia as menus and scroll bars is disorientating at first, but it soon becomes second nature. The display only shows controls that are relevant to the task in hand, usually in the form of large, clearly labelled buttons.

Scrolling is simply a matter of swiping the screen with a finger and the clever use of animation creates the impression that you’re pushing around solid objects that obey the laws of physics rather than just changing the colour of pixels. It’s really something that you have to try to fully appreciate, but it makes the iPhone so refreshingly simple to use that other stylus-led handheld operating systems seem quaint by comparison. Multi-touch is less successful when it comes to text entry, but that’s largely the result of the on-screen keyboard’s lack of tactile feedback.

The iPhone does employ some ingenious methods that help it work out what words you’re typing based on the keys being pressed (whether they’re mis-keys or not), but this doesn’t catch every typo. Two-thumbed typing is possible with practice, but it takes longer to reach this level of skill than with a traditional smartphone thumb-board. Still, the iPhone’s minor input issues are far outweighed by its smorgasbord of other clever touches.

The Safari web browser is best on any handheld and its ability to zoom from a full-page view to exactly the right part of the page you want with a couple of taps on the screen is very impressive. More ingenious still are the motion sensors that rotate the display when the iPhone is turned on its side, giving a widescreen view of web pages and photos. Such similarly thoughtful touches abound on the iPhone, from the light sensor that adjusts screen brightness according to ambient light, to the proximity sensor that disables the screen when the iPhone is brought near your face to make a call.And, of course, it’s also the best iPod ever, packing all the same features as the iPod Touch (though not the same commodious capacity).

As critics have been quick to point out, as impressive as these features are, the iPhone’s base specification doesn’t offer much that can’t be found in smartphones from a year or two ago. Such complaints are missing the point, though -- it’s not what the iPhone does but how it does it that’s so groundbreaking. Sure, 3G would be nice but the seamless transition between Wi-Fi and EDGE connections according to what’s available makes web browsing as painless as on a broadband PC.

Threaded SMS chat and the switch on the side of the case that silences the ringer may have first appeared on the Palm Treo 600 in 2004, but Apple is the only manufacturer to recognise the value of such features since. There is one unique innovation that Apple does particular deserve kudos for, though – visual voicemail. Rather than force you to sit through voicemail messages in the order they were received, the iPhone displays the caller’s details on-screen and you can playback and delete messages in any order you like.

Unfortunately, for all its incredible features, the inability to install third-party applications makes the iPhone far less capable than any (admittedly far less usable) Windows Mobile or Blackberry device. The supplied applications are good (woefully inadequate calendar aside), but they don’t provide nearly enough smartphone functionality for our liking. The release of the software development kit early next year should remedy this, but quite what it will enable developers to produce remains to be seen.

More problematic is the price. £269 for the 8Gb iPhone is certainly fair for the level of sophistication on offer, but the subsequent £35 a month you must pay for O₂’s cheapest tariff is not. 200 inclusive minutes and texts a month help sweeten the deal, as does ‘unlimited’ data access, but there’s not getting away from the fact that you’ll have paid at least £899 over the course of the 18 month contract. After living with the iPhone for a week, we have to grudgingly admit that it’s almost worth it and it’s only the lack of third-party application support that prevents us from giving it an unequivocal thumbs-up.