Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

recently it seems that not a month goes by where there isn’t an earth-shattering piece of new technology hitting the stores after a biblical amount of hype. The Nintendo wii, the PS3 and most recently, Apple’s long-awaited iPhone. It’s arrival might not have been as hugely anticipated as the PS3 and it surely won’t remain perpetually out of stock like the Wii but for a mobile phone, this amount of hype is truly unprecedented.

A select few uber-geeks camped outside O2 shops for 36 hours to get their hands on the first few sleek, sexy handsets but the most important question is, does this device live up to the hype? I’ve never touched an iPhone so I can’t comment on things like how much it weighs in your hand, how easy it is to operate and aspects like how fragile it is. I have however studied it’s technical specifications and I can compare it to other smartphones on the market with similar features.

There’s no denying that the iPhone is a good looking piece of equipment. There’s also no denying that the creation of such objects of desire has always been Apple’s forte. They keep things fresh, there tends to be only about a year, sometimes less, between incarnations of it’s cash-cow the iPod with the newest member of the iPod family, the nano, already in it’s 3rd generation now boasting hi-def video in a package little larger than a business card case. The iPhone doesn’t just look the part either. It features a revolutionary multi-touch display rather than physical buttons. It has built in Wi-Fi and can connect directly to YouTube and play your favourite videos in a bespoke player. You can also buy songs from iTunes and have them sent directly to your iPhone’s integrated iPod over the internet.

So, with my contract coming to an end in the next couple of months, will I be having one of these babies? I can tell you categorically that i most certainly will not. The main reason being that as far as I can see it is hardly an upgrade from my current phone, the Nokia N80 and in a lot of respects it is a downgrade. For example the camera is a below average 2 megapixels and it cannot capture video, the phone doesn’t support 3G so if you don’t use Wi-Fi, web sessions can be painfully slow, there is no MMS support the only way you’re sending files about is by attaching them to an e-mail and it doesn’t support Java. These are all basic features that we pretty much expect to see in all smartphones.

Software isn’t the only problem with the iPhone either, the device comes with either 8 or 16 GB of solid-state storage, nothing compared with the same price video iPod and because the iPhone uses a cut down version of MacOS X you’re fore-fitting a whopping 700MB of that space before you’re uploaded a single file. The battery is integrated and when it starts to wear down and charge-discharge cycles get shorter (and it will start to before your compulsory 18 month contract is up) you have to send the phone away for a new battery at your expense. The multi-touch display offers a nice easy control method and the way you can scan through your music is probably the best method seen on any iPod to date, but the integration of phone functionality just seems poorly done, almost an afterthought. Apple’s iPod Touch is a much more appropriate application of this technology. Phones with touch sensitive buttons are not for everyone they can be far too sensitive as in the Samsung U600. In that phone you can be typing a text message and ever so slightly skim one of the buttons and it will erase your whole text message and not save it to the drafts folder. In an iPod, however, this functionality is good as Apple have demonstrated in their past applications of the scroll wheel in past iPods.

That just leaves us with the small matter of the cost. Except it isn’t a small matter, not at all. The cost of ownership (excluding calls and texts) is well over the £1000 mark. The handset itself is £269 and the middle tariff that offers you a reasonable amount of calls, texts and data will set you back a cringe-worthy £45 a month! You can’t even shop around because at the present time, the iPhone is only available from O2 and unlocking the handset could easily void your warrenty. Now, network specific handsets aren’t anything new in the states but it is pretty much unheard of in the UK and it doesn’t seem to be going down too well.

All this won’t detract from the iPhone’s appeal to die-hard Apple fans though. I’m sure that those uber-geeks that camped outside stores to get one aren’t disappointed with their purchase. But Apple need to be careful now. Many more of these blatant style over function releases could start costing them customers, especially when there are a number of handsets from other phone manufacturers on the horizon with equal or superior features. The LG U990 is just one of these. It offers the full touch screen display, 5 megapixel camera and 3G.