Simon’s Blog

Now that “real people” have iPhones in their hands, the reviews and hands-on videos are coming in. The truth is - they’re a little mixed. Up until now, we’ve had only a handful of favoured journalists review the phone; journalists that Apple knew would be enthusiastic about their products (Steve Jobs doesn’t like people that aren’t amazed by his products). So, what’s the iPhone really like?

You have only to take one look at the iPhone to know that it’s a game-changer. As I thought it would on the day it was announced, iPhone has catapulted into the lead in the mobile handset world. However, in this “version 1″, there were always going to be problems. So, what are the short-comings? Herewith, some of non-gushing comments and observations taken from genuinely credible sources in the first few hours that iPhone has been out in the wild…

Engadget

First up, take a look at the hands-on video from Engadget. It’s unedited, so you can see, for real, how well the touchscreen works. The truth is - the touchscreen doesn’t always respond well to input. For example, at 38 seconds, Ryan needs three attempts to get the iPhone to register the selection of his e-mail account; and at 5 mins 5 seconds, Ryan needs two attempts to get the screen to register his tap when looking at his albums in coverflow mode.

MobileBurn

MobileBurn is one of the best mobile handset review sites on the web. They stood in line, and purchased an iPhone along with everyone else, so they could get an early review up. Here’s some of the not-so-good things they had to say…

iTunes did not sync my Outlook calendar and contacts, like it claimed it was doing… A later attempt to sync got the contacts over, but the calendar still remains empty.

We came across a potential resource management bug that caused the Email application to close a second after it was opened, regardless of what we did. Shutting the iPhone down and restarting it got around the problem.

I’m also a bit worried about the durability of the rear cover of the device. Our iPhone already has a few imperfections in it just from the brief photo session it went through to get these photos.

The kicker, however, is the call audio quality. It is bad. Really bad. We’ll have to test it out tomorrow in a stronger signal area, but so far it would rate with some of the worst phones I have tested in the past two years when it comes to the call audio quality heard by the iPhone user.

Dave Winer

Dave Winer is an Apple fan; but he’s not afraid to criticize. He already has an initial review up on his blog. Dave says,

I like to use my iPod with manual synchronization, but that doesn’t appear to be possible with this.

Conclusion

These are just the reviews that have come in within the first few hours; nothing is really conclusive yet. The bottom line, though, is that the iPhone does appearing to be largely working as advertised. That’s a huge problem for Apple’s competition, who seem to have their heads in the sand. For example, I saw a comment on CNBC from the chief of Microsoft’s mobile division saying that iPhone doesn’t change what they’re doing. I’m sorry to say this, but he’s either plain lying, plain stupid or plain delusional. There’s simply no doubt that iPhone changes the mobile space in a major way.

It’s not perfect though. For the moment, Steve Jobs appears to have a blind spot when it comes to Java on the iPhone. Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, should each be trying to move heaven and earth to take their respective, substantial expertise with mobile Java; combine it with the lessons learned from Apple has done with iPhone (they though touchscreens wouldn’t work, and Apple has just shown they do); and create some killer new handsets.

So, the competition still has a chance to build a product that’s “better” than iPhone; but they need to start catching-up fast… Apple isn’t standing still. The first iPhone has only been launched for a day, and already the rumour, from Guy Kewney - a credible journalist - is that Apple will be announcing an evolutionary model - a 3G iPhone - in the UK on Monday; along with a multi-carrier deal for the European market (in a response to the criticism of the exclusive deal with AT&T in the US). The big networks to be announced will be Vodafone and T-Mobile; but it seems that Carphone Warehouse will also be announced as a virtual network carrier. If this rumour pans out, Orange and O2 executives are going to look pretty clueless (although, I’ve just been e-mailed something to suggest that O2 might be in on the deal too, which would be bad news for Orange).

Update: see the comments for some thoughts from a couple of early iPhone users…