So … you’re thinking about buying one of those new fangled iphones? You’ve seen the internet hype, watched the commercials, and perhaps looked enviously at those early adopters. The iPhone is somewhat revolutionary, but this far after launch the little gizmo certainly isn’t “newsbreaking.”
So why am I reviewing it? Well, because I just bought one! Many professional tech writers, bloggers, and computer-profesionals have already reviewed this phone, in a written manner more eloquent than my own. However, as an ophthalmologist with a healthy interest in “tech,” I felt that a review would be helpful for others out there in healthcare who are looking at their mobile options.
When it comes to a purchase like this, you have to justify the expense. Do you really want to sink another 400 dollars in a handheld gadget and lock yourself into a two-year contract with ATT, a phone company with a somewhat tattered reputation among the cellular carriers? Is the iPhone worth it?
A little history: What’s your PDA and smart phone experience?
I’ve been using smart phones and PDAs in practice for years now, ever since the first PalmPilot Pro came out with its four shades of gray screen and whopping 1mb of memory. Over the past five years, the genre of personal organizers has really advanced.
Historically, the Palm platform has been the leader in hospitals and medical schools, especially with the introduction of the svelte Palm V. Enthusiastic programmers and publishers quickly developed medical calculators, patient tracking software, and digital health reference that could be synced onto the Palm platform. This seemed like a good idea at the time, and I’ve installed a ton of software onto my old Palms. In practice, however, these utilities were completely ineffective given the difficulty with data entry (how good are YOUR graffiti skills?) and retrieval on the tiny PDA screen.
The list of useful medical software is actually quite short, with the only software I’ve used consistently over the years being EPocrates (used for looking up drugs and dosages on the fly).
As such, PDAs have disappearing from the wards, to be replaced by smartphones – phones with the ability to run PDA applications and retrieve information online. These convergent devices combine the power of a PDA with the connectivity of the internet and allow you to check your email, make calls, and surf the internet. The once powerful Palm PDA brand is loosing profit, despite their acquirement of Handspring’s excellent Treo smartphones.
But what about the iPhone?
The iPhone is the latest iteration of the “smartphone” with the purpose of further converging a video iPod with a phone. This is the first mobile foray by Apple, a design company with a proven track record of excellent human-machine interface. Their entry into the cellphone world has been watched with enthusiasm by consumers who feel that their cellphone is “too difficult” to use.
The iPhone … what is it?
The iphone is pretty neat piece of kit with the goal of converging three different devices into one. These include:
1. Phone
2. Music/Video Player
3. Internet device
None of these functions are new or revolutionary. Smartphones like the Palm Treo have been capable of playing music, video, and surfing the internet for the past four years. However, Apple is trying to do these things … better! Let’s take a look at each of these goals one by one, and compare the iPHone to another smartphone: the highly successful Palm Treo.
Goal One: How good a phone is it?
As a phone, the iPHone is quite good. The phone feels solid in your hand, with a rigid metal body and glass face. If you’ve never used a smartphone, the experience can feel odd … using the iPhone has been described by friends as “holding a piece of cold tile to your cheek.” Sound quality is excellent, and the phone sets up three-way calls easier than any phone I’ve ever used. The earpiece volume is almost too soft for me, and I wish I could make it as loud as my old Treo. That said, I haven’t yet been in a situation where I couldn’t hear a conversation.
One thing that I really like on this phone is the virtual dial pad. The retro-large-button phone keyboard is ideal for typing complicated pager numbers (such as a hospital extension). It used to be a nightmare paging a resident on my old Treo. Not so anymore! The large onscreen buttons are responsive and almost as easy to use as a landline phone.
The included earphones have a microphone built into the right wire with excellent pickup. When a call comes in, your music fades away so you can hear the ring and you can answer by clicking the microphone like a button. Nice. You can even assign different ringtones to different contacts, so that you don’t necessarily need to look at the phone before answering.
One feature I DON’T like with the phone is the difficulty looking up contacts. To find a name, you have to scroll through your entire list of contacts (a real hassle if you’ve collected hundreds of names in Outlook over the years). This was better handled with my old Treo, where all I had to do was start typing out a contact name while the phone narrowed the choices down at lightning speed. The phone DOES have a favorites section, but I try to avoid it because the phone then dials with a single touch … if you hit the wrong name, you call the wrong person.
Overall, the iPhone is a good phone that I rank on par with my Treo. It’s easier to page people and call complicated phone numbers that aren’t already in your contacts, but it is also harder to look up contacts.
Goal 2: How Good an iPod is it?
As much as I like mp3 players, I didn’t buy an iPod for many years. While I’ve used MP3 players since early 2,000 (mostly Rio and Creative labs) I never bothered with the iPod as I didn’t want a hard-drive based player that might crash when running. Also, at that time of my life I didn’t want to be associated with the younger college kids (the black-clad kids with the tattoos and piercings) that were carrying around those white iPods.
A few years ago I broke down and bought the original flash-based iPod Nano and absolutely LOVED it! The scrolling thumbwheel interface is incredible, and the way iTunes downloads and syncs my favorite podcasts … it was magic and changed the way I listen to talk radio and audiobooks.
Music: The iPhone is a great video player, but is NOT as good an audioplayer as the dedicated iPod nano. Sure, it sounds just as good, but navigating music, audiobooks, and playing PodCasts is cumbersome. The lack of a tactile control is sorely missed … most of the wonder of prior iPods was the incredible scroll wheel interface. They threw it out with the iPhone, and the touch screen alternative is NOT as good and difficult to use one handed.
For example, I listen to many audiobooks and podcasts: mp3 files that are an hour long. With a scrollwheel, it was easy to fast-forward through a long audiofile to a specific spot, or rewind a few seconds to re-hear a segment. The iPhone uses an onscreen slider (like on a computer) that I have manually move with my finger … a millimeter slide of my big finger jumps several minutes. There is no fine control.
And using it while you run … well, it’s hard to change songs/podcasts without tactile feedback. With my nano I’d just click NEXT with a single finger without even looking at the device on my armband. With the iPhone, however, you have to turn the screen on (home button press and unlock slide), look at the screen to find the NEXT button, try to hit the right spot, then turn the screen off with another button on top of the phone. Big pain in the butt.
When navigating music, the design is difficult for one handed use. The play controls are far distant from the navigation buttons. Your thumb is going to get a good stretch if you want to try this one handed. This just doesn’t make sense.
The recessed earphone jack forces you to use the apple earbuds … I don’t mind this as I prefer earbuds (though not apple-white ones). The recessed nature of the jack means the earphones won’t get pulled out by accident. Compare this to the Palm Treo, which had the worse earphone jack imaginable - a tiny 2.5mm jack meant for telephone accessories that was mounted on the bottom of the phone. This Treo jack required the use of an adapter and would come unplugged if you looked at it funny. While the iPhone isn’t ideal, I think the earphone jack is just fine.
The iPhone can be challenging to load music on as you have to use synced playlists. No more dragging and dropping music right onto the device. Playlist management is poor, and smart playlists don’t work well.
The iPhone is still a better music player than any smartphone I’ve used, but as you can see from these complaints, it’s not as good as a dedicated iPod for audio playback.
Video
Video playback is a whole other beast – and iPhone is a fantastic video player. Image quality is phenomenal on the large screen, and ripped DVD movies look gorgeous. While my Treo could play videos using mmplayer, it would crash constantly. Video playback on the iPhone is perfect, though I am spending a lot of time reencoding my videos into iPod-compatable mpeg4 files. If you’re really into video like myself, the iPhone is perfect.
A few gripes however:
1. It is difficult to make video playlists. Right now my twenty home movies are mixed with fifty eye videos, mixed with two movies and several TV shows. Unlike music, there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to organize video.
2. Videos can only be played in Landscape mode, meaning that my car mount has to be turned 90 degrees to the left to avoid hurting my neck.
These things aside, the phone is still a GREAT video player. The quality is superb, especially when you rip a DVD with a program like HandBreak. Here’s a video showing what movie playback looks like after ripping with HandBreak. Can you tell what movie this is?
Goal 3: An internet viewer
An internet browser? On a phone? Who cares? An internet browser was the feature I was least interested in when buying this phone. Web browsing has always been painful (practically unusable) on my Treo, and the iPhone is still on a slow EDGE network.
Well, this is the one utility that I am most impressed with … the iPhone is a GREAT internet browsing machine! It renders webpages fast, and navigating the web is easier on this phone than any handheld device I’ve ever used before.
My old treo was PAINFUL to browse the web. This iPhone … well, it’s awesome, especially when using a WiFi connection. It connects to my apartment’s wireless router easier than any PDA I’ve ever used. I used to pull out hair getting my old pocket PC hooked up to my open WiFi network - the iPhone connected automagically. You may have difficulties getting a hospital IT hook you up, but if you have a private office network, then you should be set.
The phone renders webpages the way they are meant to be viewed on a desktop. It is really incredible, and the slide and pinch moves letting you zoom and view text with ease. You can browse multiple pages at a time, and even log into password-protected sites as if you were sitting at a real computer. To get an idea of how the web-browsing works, check out this video:
At home I find myself viewing many of my daily websites from the comfort of the couch, bed, and even the bath tub. It really is that easy!
The safari browser still can’t render flash or embedded video, but still, it’s pretty impressive and to my mind is actually the most revolutionary part of this system’s GUI. This phone shows that improvements in usability can still be made in the mobile market, and this is where the phone really stands out as a landmark piece of personal technology. I can really see a usable EMR system around a screen technology like this.
The only way to improve this? I wish there was an option to turn off images to speed up download speed while on Edge. Still, the phone renders graphics heavy webpages faster than my Treo did when the images were turned off. I’m very impressed.
It’s not really a smartphone or PDA
When most people think of a smartphone, they think of a phone that works like a computer … something you can edit documents and install third party applications. The iPhone can sync your contacts, calendar, and bookmarks. But it won’t sync my NOTES! This is a major problem, as I use my Outlook notes to keep track of passwords for various websites and other key information that I need to look up quickly.
For now, you can’t yet install third party applications. Hopefully the SDK release in February will result in the ability to install ePocrates and a good text editor. I’ve already unlocked the phone with JailBreak and have installed a number of applications … ‘Tap Tap Revolution’ is a fun game, but none of the available unauthorized applications are really necessary for me. Hopefully, someone will create a program for synching Notes and a better eBook reader.
One issue that I’ve been struggling with is data entry. The onscreen keyboard works better than I’d expect for finger typing, but overall it still kinda sucks. A real keyboard would have been ideal, but obviously can’t be fit on this thing. I wish that a stylus could be used on the screen as this would really speed up typing (I’ve gotten quite good at stylus typing over the years) but the technology used here requires your finger. Typing speed would really increase if you could increase the keyboard size in landscape mode in every application … then you could type with two thumbs. Text entry is definitely slower when compared to true keyboard phones –> I’ve gone from 25-30words per minute on my treo down to 18 on the iPhone. The autocorrect feature works well, though there isn’t a way to turn it off short of jailbreaking it. Also, it’s harder to type one-handed on the iPhone. Here’s a video of me typing to get an idea how this works:
Hopefully, someone will create a hack the phone to allow a Bluetooth keyboard to be used for text entry. This will help with writing email on the road and really decrease reliance on a laptop. I used to use an infrared keyboard on my old Dell Axim pocket PC and it was really convenient.
Conclusion
I’ve listed a lot of criticism for the iPhone, but it’s still a great phone, and if you’re looking for a way to consolidate the amount of gadgets you carry on your “batman utility belt,” than this phone is pretty sweet. A lot of thought has been put in the design to make it usable and I’m enjoying it more than any phone I’ve every used. Despite its flaws, I can’t keep my hands off the thing and it is fun to play with. It makes a great online browser, downloads email with ease, and has added video podcasts to my repertoire of portable entertainment.
Do you need the iPhone? Well I certainly like mine and have no regrets over the purchase, though I get frustrated using it to play audio when exercising! If you buy one, get a nice case! The AT&T store I bought mine from has some inexpensive leather casemate cases that are great.
Good:
Good phone
Great Video Player
Superb Internet Access
Very Usable
Lots of third-party cases and accessories
Bad:
Slow Edge connection
Earpiece volume low
Wanky playlist management
Slow text entry
No Epocrates
Notes don’t sync
[…] Admin had some great ideas on this topic.You can read a snippet of the post here.You’ve seen the internet hype, watched the commercials, and perhaps looked enviously at those early adopters. The iPhone is somewhat revolutionary, but this far after launch the little gizmo certainly isn’t “newsbreaking. … […]
The iPhone is now $199 and software is 2.0 Thought you could update the website
Comment by davesolnick — December 21, 2008 @ 11:16 pm
Great feedback on his opinion with the Iphone. I just have one thing to say about the comment about his car mount. Sorry you should not be watching a movie while driving. So no need to turn it 90degrees to the side. KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD. Now if your parked, what does SHE think about you watching a movie
So … you’re thinking about buying one of those new fangled iphones? You’ve seen the internet hype, watched the commercials, and perhaps looked enviously at those early adopters. The iPhone is somewhat revolutionary, but this far after launch the little gizmo certainly isn’t “newsbreaking.”
The iPhone is a great video player, but is NOT as good an audioplayer as the dedicated iPod nano. Sure, it sounds just as good, but navigating music, audiobooks, and playing PodCasts is cumbersome. The lack of a tactile control is sorely missed … most of the wonder of prior iPods was the incredible scroll wheel interface. They threw it out with the iPhone, and the touch screen alternative is NOT as good and difficult to use one handed. 
