It is time to say hello to the iPhone, the most remarkable communications device ever produced. This sleek metal-and-glass creation is a landmark event in a journey that began with Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in 1876. Who could ever have believed back then, when there were only two heavy handsets in existence, that one day we would be walking around with so much power in our pockets?
For the iPhone is not simply a telephone. It is the best of everything rolled up in one tiny shell: the perfect portable address book, a peerless hand-held browser, and the handiest mobile music player all rolled into one. In fact, despite the various attempts of Nokia, Sony, Creative and Samsung, it seems to be the only gadget produced so far that has any chance of knocking the iPod off the music-playing top spot. Now that is irony.
It is no wonder, then, that Apple kept it under such tight wraps in the years it took to develop.
In this chapter, we will look at the key features of the iPhone and what makes them so great, before walking you through the activation process necessary to get an iPhone working. So come with us as we explore a phone from the future that leaves all others in its wake.
Web browser
The iPhone's web browser (right) is a true 'oh wow' application. If you have ever used the Internet on a portable device before, your expectations arc probably quite low. No one has really got it right in the past, and so it took some serious rethinking of the whole way the web is presented for Apple to come up with the iPhone's web browser.
In the past, the web had been presented on phones and mobile devices in three ways: Wap, RSS or its native format. The latter of these three choices, native format, in which pages were shown as they were designed yet rendered on the smaller screen, was rarely successful. Few designers ever produced pages with phones and PDAs in mind, because they always assumed they would be viewed on a full-sized screen. Besides, if they did design for mobile displays, they would have looked terrible on our desktop computers. There was a workaround that would allow them to produce separate style Hies and have the browser pick the most appropriate one depending on whether it was a full-sized computer screen or a pokey portable display, but few did. The result was that pages would drift off the right-hand and lower edges of the mobile's screen, and you would end up reading them piecemeal, scrolling around with a stylus or keypad until you had seen the whole page. Hardly a satisfying experience.
Wap was little better. It used a subtly different language to regular web pages, and for a while it looked as though it may become the predominant method for building mobile sites. Pages were organised into 'decks', like cards, that could be navigated by scrolling down each one using a rocker switch or joystick on your phone and then clicking when you had highlighted a link. Again, it was far from perfect, as it was really designed for a time when it was expensive to pass data over mobile networks, and few phones could connect to WiFi. This meant pages were light on both text and graphics anci so were, ultimately, unsatisfying. Of course, it also meant developers had to produce each page twice: once for computers using HTML, and once for phones and PDAs using Wap.
Then there was RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending on who you talk to), which remains popular to this day and is used extensively on regular computers. However, reading RSS is not like browsing the web, as it is simply the content of the page stripped out from the design. That makes it very efficient, and it allows you to combine several streams of information from various sites in a single location. However, as many sites only provide you with a summary of each page rather than all the information it contains, you often end up having to visit the site itself to get the rest. That would lead you back to the problem of how you present a full-sized web page on a one-eighth-sized screen. Plus, of course, page summaries are no good for showing you things like bus timetables, railway maps or presentation slides.
So it must have been clear to Apple from the very first day its engineers sat down to plan the iPhone's development that if it was to include a web browser people would actually want to use, then it would have to make something more efficient, more impressive and far more usable than anything that had gone before it.
In short, it would have to display full-sized web pages on a tiny screen in their original format in such a way that it would seem they had been designed for just that format.
Apple achieved this in two ways. First, it gave the iPhone a truly massive resolution, so that even when shrunk down you would still be able to read headings and body text on most web pages. Second, it let you tap to selectively zoom in and out on the sections of a page that you want to read in more detail. It effectively wrote a browser that was the best of both worlds, taking the tried and tested piecemeal approach of its predecessors, and mixing it with the far superior overview mode of a desktop computer that fits the whole width of a page in the window at once.
Email client
If you have ever seen anyone use a BlackBerry, or used one yourself, you will know how useful it can be to have access to your email on the move. What makes the BlackBerry great, though, is the fact that you don't have to manually check your email every half hour to find out whether you have any new messages waiting for collection.
That is because the BlackBerry uses a technology known as 'push' email, whereby the server sends the email to your device whether you have requested it or not. It is a formula that has proved so successful that many users are finding themselves getting addicted to a device that.
in some quarters, has been nicknamed the CrackBerry.
Apple has developed MobileMe to offer a similar service to iPhone users, whereby email received at a designated me.com email address will be pushed straight to the screen of the phone.
So what docs all of this mean for you? Simply simplicity, at its most basic level. It takes all of the hassle out of mobile email, because the messages come to you and can be dealt with as soon and as often as you like. And because the email is stored on Apple's servers it enables you to access it from any device in any location. This means that any email you mark as read on your Mac or PC will also be marked as read on your iPhone, and any email you send while you are out and about will also appear in the sent items folder on your computer.
MobileMe is not the only emailing service open to you, though; the iPhone can also connect to a host of other services including Ymail, Gmail and regular Pop3 services.
However, while connecting to your own Pop3 server means you can use your regular email address on your iPhone, you won't be able to synchronise the read and unread status of your messages, or have a record of those messages sent from your iPhone on your regular computer, unless you cc the same messages back to yourself.
Maps
Online mapping is nothing new. We have had countless online street maps to choose from since the turn of the millennium, but one service has trumped them all: Google Maps. By mixing street-level mapping with high-quality satellite imagery, Google came up with a winning combination that has since been copied by half a dozen pretenders to its crown.
Not surprisingly, Apple chose to implement what most consider to be the original and best service into the iPhone, and Google Maps earned itself a dedicated button on the iPhone home screen. It integrates almost every Google Maps feature, including the invaluable business database.
This allows you to look up local businesses and services (left), such as car repair shops and pizza restaurants, and call them directly using the iPhone's telephony features. Indeed, this was one of the most impressive features of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' unveiling of the iPhone in San Francisco in January 2007. In front of an audience of press and industry leaders, he looked up the nearest Starbucks coffee shop to the Moscone Center, where he was making his presentation, and ordered 4,000 lattes to go. Whether it was a setup, or he really did wind up an innocent barista remains to be seen, but it was an effective and impressive demonstration of the usefulness of the Google Maps feature when combined with the iPhone's telephony tools.
The first major addition to the Maps application was the ability for the iPhone to triangulate your position by comparing the strength of signals received from the mobile phone network, and to plot the point on the map. This works with the original 2.5G iPhone, although accuracy varied greatly depending on network coverage in your area.
With the iPhone 3G, this has been enhanced with the addition of a fully-fledged Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. This accepts incoming positional data from a US satellite network to provide more precise information, plotting your location to within a metre or so. Like the network triangulation performed by the original iPhone, its accuracy does vary depending on a range of factors, such as cloud cover and your ability to see an open sky (so it won't work inside buildings unless you arc next to a window), but the information it returns to the phone can be genuinely useful. Already developers are finding ways to build it into their applications, with Loopt (loopt.com/loopt/iphone.aspx ) using it to run a geographically-aware social networking service.
Camera
No phone worth its salts ships without a camera. How different that is to six years ago when the networks were just starting to push the exciting idea of paying extortionate rates to send pictures to your friends. Now it is almost impossible to buy a new phone that doesn't have a camera, and even those of us who do not use them to send photos over the mobile network find them invaluable as digital notebooks when out shopping or spending time with family and friends.
The iPhone's camera was one of the biggest surprises when Steve Jobs revealed the gadget's final specifications. Not because it was so advanced, like everything else inside its sleek glass and metal shell, but because in the first models it was comparably conservative. With a resolution of just two mega pixels, the camera was easily outclassed by many cheaper competitors and looked like it was decided on well in advance of the iPhone actually going into production, at a time when such a pokey pixel count would have been the norm.
The iPhone 3G sports this same camera, but if you have upgraded to -or started out with - an iPhone 3GS, you can take advantage of far higher resolutions thanks to the more advanced three megapixel sensor that gives you the option of enlarging your images for bigger prints or, should you choose, cropping in on specific details. This would not be so easy with the lower-resolution sensor as you would have less image to crop while retaining a usable portion.
The focus on the iPhone 3G's camera is determined by the phone itself, but in the 3GS it is controlled by the user, allowing you to tap on items on the screen to focus on them. This gives you far greater creative freedom when using the phone as a photographic device. Photos can now be geotagged by using the iPhone's built-in GPS receiver to mark them with the coordinates at which they were taken. These can then be used for filing, or for presenting your images on a map. They are also understood by services like sharing site Flickr.
Since the introduction of the iPhone 3GS, the camera's final innovation is the introduction of video recording, albeit at a fairly conservative resolution of 640 x 480 pixels.
Despite all of these upgrades, three megapixels may still sound a little conservative when compared to some of the iPhone's rivals, but as the sensor chip is so small you may actually do better to stick at that
level, as cramming more pixels on a very small sensor can degrade the quality of your images.
Modern technology allows sensor manufacturers to produce smaller and smaller sensors, so more of them can now be crammed onto tiny chips, just a few millimetres across. This gives you higher resolutions, but can also lead to a very undesirable phenomenon called noise. This is a muddy interference that can blight pictures taken with overambitious cameras, in which the sensor is electrically overloaded. Each sensor cell exceeds its capacity to differentiate between the various levels of light being received, and they effectively overflow from one into another. The result is a very unattractive mess that, while still easily discernible as a photo, you would not want to be printing or posting on the web.
In most cases, the resolution of a sensor has less to do with the sharpness of an image than the quality of the lens in front of it. Fortunately this is an area in which the iPhone 3GS does well.
Address book
From the very earliest days of mass mobile adoption, mobile phones have integrated a built-in phone book (left). Its capacity is often seen as a key decision-making factor by many users when looking for their next handset, as few would want to carry both their mobile and a paper or electronic address book in their jacket pockets.
As manufacturers cottoned on to this and tried to build in more and more features, many started to integrate fully fledged address books that could take street details, email addresses and website URLs, alongside regular numbers. Many live and die by this feature, with some models being criticized by some users for having inflexible address books that can attach only one number to each name.
The iPhone blows even the best mobile address book out of the water, with a fully fledged contact management system that can handle names, numbers, addresses and even photos. It synchronises with your PC or Mac, so that the numbers on your phone match the ones on your computer. In addition, the management tools, such as easy entry and deletion, mean you will not have to navigate a dozen menus just to update a business associate's record when they change jobs.The iPhone 3G and 3GS build on the original iPhone's address book features by building in a sophisticated new search feature.
Music and movie player
The iPhone is Apple's next logical step from the iPod, so it is only to be expected that it includes a first-class music player. In fact, so confident is Apple that this is a worthy successor that it describes the iPhone as a 'widescreen iPod with touch controls'.
It has two key benefits over the regular iPod. First is the size of the screen, which allows you to view movies in a more accurate aspect ratio and control playback with a more natural and logical set of controls than the limited scroll-wheel found on most iPods. Second is the interface, which allows you to flick back and forth through your music collection just as you would if you were leafing through CD covers in a music library.
Now that the iTunes Store also features movie and TV show downloads, you can also use your iPhone to catch up on programmes you have missed. Prices vary depending on what you choose to download, but because the system is so well integrated with iTunes on the Mac and PC, and Apple TV - if you have one - in your lounge, it doesn't matter how you buy your media as you can watch it anywhere you choose. For rentals, you must commence viewing within 30 days of downloading the rental, and
you must finish it within wo days of starting (think of it as best before date). The prices are roughly similar to what you might expect to find in a high street DVD rental store.
The iPhone is no dumb telephone — it has a variety of communications tools built in, with Bluetooth (see below) and wireless, or 'wifi', networking supplementing its range of mobile features. Wifi is the same networking protocol as that used by wireless computers, laptops, home routers and modems. It is also commonly found in workplaces and coffee shops, enabling iPhone owners to browse the web without paying high fees to the mobile networks.
The wifi tools built into the iPhone are key to many of its most important features, such as Google Maps and handling email, but many industry observers had expected Apple to have made more of them, perhaps by including an Internet telephony application (Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP) among its feature set.
When the iPhone was finally revealed, however, this was conspicuous by its absence, and with good reason: including a tool of this kind would impact the mobile networks' ability to generate revenue by providing regular phone calls.
Fortunately, VoIP tools can be integrated into web pages and several enterprising third-party developers have subsequently provided a means for iPhone owners to connect to the Skype network, which is one of the most popular consumer-level Internet telephony applications.
VoIP has now appeared on the iPhone in the form of third-party applications, Truphone, which is available to download from the iTunes App Store. Truphone allows you to make international calls at just 3p a minute. In the meantime, the wifi connection ensures that wherever you arc you always have the best Internet connection possible for an unsurpassed mobile browsing experience.
Bluetooth
The iPhone's third means of wireless connectivity is Bluetooth 2.0+EDR. This second-generation radio protocol is three times faster than its predecessor and consumes less power, so shouldn't hammer the iPhone's battery so hard when in regular use. The EDR in its specification stands for Enhanced Data Rate, which means it can shuttle the equivalent of three megabits of information backwards and forwards every second. What docs this mean in the real world? Well, three megabits is about 360 written characters, so you should be able to transfer one or two address book entries between the iPhone and another device every second or so.
Bluetooth is slower than wireless networking and has a shorter range, with most devices incapable of transmitting further than about 10 meters. So while technically feasible, this radio technology would never be a truly practical means of efficiently transferring large blocks of data or surfing the web. For most iPhone owners, its use will, therefore, largely be confined to transferring photos and other small chunks of data, or connecting to a wireless Bluetooth headset.
So why still use such a short-range, slow technology?
Simply that it has one major benefit: widespread compatibility. Bluetooth devices arc able to see each other when in range and, because they have built-in 'profiles' that describe their features and abilities, thev arc able to inform each other of how they can interact. This allows for easy set-up, with little or no input from users.
Satellite navigation
GPS features were long-rumoured for inclusion in an upgraded iPhone, but until the 3G variant was introduced, nobody could be quite sure whether Apple's engineers would have been able to integrate
an upgraded communications chip (3G hardware draws more power than the 2.5G chips used in the original iPhone) with a GPS receiver. But Apple not only worked out how to do this without increasing the size and weight of the battery, it also managed to slim down the physical size of the handset itself.
With GPS features built-in, you will always know exactly where you are at any time and, as a bonus, geotag your photos. This allows you to attach position-defining data to your images so that then can then be positioned on maps. Geotagging is a fledgling technology, but its popularity is growing so it is good to see that Apple is adopting it so early on in the iPhone 3G.
On-screen keyboard
Have you ever suffered from texter's thumb? You know — that dull ache you get from sending too many predictive notes to your friends? Now imagine you had ail the power of an iPhone in your hand, but all the letters of the alphabet were still crammed onto just eight number keys, with another one reserved for spaces and punctuation.
It wouldn't work.
As such, it is fortunate that the iPhone has gone the other way and done away with physical buttons altogether. Apart from the power button, ringer switch, volume control and central button on the bottom of the iPhone's fascia, there are no external moving parts on the iPhone, as all of the other buttons have been moved into the software realm and are rendered as graphics on the touchscreen.
This does have its drawbacks. For starters, you can't easily take a self-portrait by turning the phone around and snapping yourself at arm's length, because without any raised buttons you can't reliably tell where the iPhone camera's shutter release is located. Most users also have some difficulty in using the iPhone's on-screen keyboard for the first few days but, as with many advances of this type, it is simply a matter of getting used to it and not thinking about how it works.
Fortunately, it is quite intelligent, and while the keys arc small (how else would you fit them all onto the screen in portrait mode?), the iPhone's touch-sensitive membrane is accurate enough to sense where your fingers arc falling and magnify each button as you press it, greatly increasing most users' accuracy.
Don't believe us? Well, think back to the first time you started to use T9 predictive messaging. If you were anything like us, you probably spent a lot of time looking at the screen and trying to work out how you could create each word as you typed, so great was the required mind-shift in the move from picking out characters individually. Soon, though, you learned not to think about how it worked, but to just get on with things and - you know what - by the power of technology it did what you wanted, and eight times out of 10, it got the word you wanted.
Treat your iPhone's on-screen keyboard in a similar way and you will not
go far wrong. As an added bonus, because the iPhone docs not have a hard-wired keyboard like a BlackBerry or a traditional non-stylus PDA, it means that Apple can quickly integrate new features, such as a wider range of languages in updated editions. This was first evident with the arrival of the iPhone 3G, which introduced image-based languages in the Far East.
Home screen
The home screen is where you will find the icons and buttons that link you to every other application on your iPhone. It includes a range of information elements, such as network coverage and strength, wifi availability and remaining battery power as well as the current time. You can return to the home screen at any time by pressing the physical circular button at the bottom of the iPhone's front surface. You can also rearrange the application icons by holding down on an icon on the dock bar at the bottom of the screen until they all start to shiver. At this point they can be dragged into their new positions.
You can also create shortcuts to frequently visited web pages or online applications on the Home screen. This saves you from having to first launch the browser and then navigate to them in the conventional manner by opening the page you want using Safari, pressing the + button at the bottom of the Safari screen and choosing the Add to home screen option from the menu that pops up.
Phone
With so many other features, the iPhone's actual phone component becomes something of an 'also-ran' tool (above right), as it is almost crowded out by more exciting offerings such as the music player, web browser, mapping applications and the fully automated email client.
Yet there it is, sitting square and centre, and well integrated with a whole raft of other tools, including the Address Book and Google Maps. It features call holding and conference calling, which while they are also found on other mobile phones, is better built and easier to use on the iPhone than on most of its rivals. Before you can use it, though, you need to activate your device, and that is where we are beading next...
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