Review of the Apple iPhone

Apple set its foot on the mobile phone market in June 2007 - with the release of its first mobile phone, the iPhone. Being obsessed with iPods, Apple decided to please its fans with a multimedia handset that still keeps the Apple image intact, with a style of its own. Thus the iPhone was designed, and the rest, as they say is history. We know how popular the iPhone became despite the lack of conventional features of modern phones. Find out more about "Apple engineering" in this iPhone review by phones.com.

Look, Design, Feel (9/10)

The iPhone truely has some unique looks. Apple styled the iPhone to remind you a portable media player, though it beats any standalone music player because it is a phone too, and much more! The phone is sleek and measures 115 x 61 x 11.6 mm. The weight of the iPhone (135 grams) makes a big difference, it lets you enjoy the full splendor of the gorgeous 3.5" touchscreen. The phone stays solid in your hand while operating the iPhone's capacitive touchscreen one-handedly is no hassle. The iPhone is constructed of a metallic frame. The back looks chic in the metallic cover. There's some Apple finishing-touch given to the rear, making it a flashy gadget.

Features (8/10)

The iPhone is extremely popular for its feature portfolio. We know how Apple captured the portable music player market with the iPod. The iPhone is another such product that changed the definition of touchscreen phones. First thing to mention here is that the iPhone runs a portable version of Apple's Mac OS X. Don't expect anything big, there's no supporting for multitasking yet. Users of the Mac will recognize the iPhone easily as being derived from the Mac. Everything in the iPhone is intended to be controlled through touch, so Apple has taken extreme care with the interface and touchscreen. You can easily learn to operate the iPhone in a matter of minutes, because the iPhone responds to most natural gestures of touch. Dragging items, scrolling or zooming can be performed through quick and instinctive gestures that the iPhone effortlessly understands and responds to. You can notice no lagging of menus or screen rotation like in smartphones. Since Apple has made the iPhone to be easy to operate, many smartphone functions are left behind. A pleasure to use is the half-VGA screen running at 480x320 pixels in 16 M colors. Sunlight legibility was good. The phone has an outdated 2 MP camera with no bells and whistles whatsoever. We really liked the Safari browser which renders pages much like on a desktop. Everything responded to touch like magic, and the iPhone was very special in this aspect. Other features include the iPod like multimedia player (still much better), screen auto-rotate and proximity sensor. Sadly, there was no FM Radio present on the iPhone. Memory support was good and had an option between 4/8/16 GB. There's a 3.5 mm audio jack and speakerphone support. TV-out is also supported.

Connectivity (7/10)

Apple somehow leaved out 3G support on the original iPhone. This phone is only a Quad-band GSM handset with support for EDGE and GPRS. The iPhone has WLAN support with 802.11 b/g compatibilty, and Bluetooth 2.0. However, Bluetooth was limited to headset support, and not even files can be transferred to or from the iPhone. A miniUSB connector allows USB 2.0 connections.

Performance (8/10)

The iPhone is packed with a good battery. However we must mention that the iPhone's battery is not user-replacable, making things complicated and delayed in case of battery failure. The iPhone promises an 8-hour talk time which seems very good for a feature phone. There's also a reasonable back up of over ten days.

Value for Money (8/10)

The original iPhone is now discontinued, however many users still show interest to purchase one. Though this little marvel has become the synonym for a touchscreen phone, it was nevertheless expensive. Now that Apple has the iPhone 3G in most markets as a replacement for the original iPhone, it seems unwise to buy the 2G iPhone. It is still a very good buy for Apple lovers, so we can say Apple produced a worthy product for its fanatics.