iPhone Experience: Real-world testing

Fully rested from Friday night's excitement, I grabbed my iPhone and hit the streets. How would it perform under real world, on-the-street conditions? I found out.

I should note that I live in the middle of nowhere, so this post may be of particular interest to those who don't live in major cities.

My first test was a long shot, but I couldn't resist. Once in my car, I put my iPhone into my Belkin Tunebase FM and plugged it in. I mean, it's an iPod, right?

"This accessory does not work with iPhone," it said. That's what I expected, but I still had to try.

On The Street

I drove to a densely populated part of town on a cloudless day. The iPhone's display was more difficult to read in the bright sun. Cranking up the brightness level helped, but to be honest, it was never illegible.

On The EDGE

On Main Street there wasn't a WiFi network to be had, so I was riding the bleeding EDGE. With three bars, I launched Mail. It took maybe 10-12 seconds for the iPhone to find and retrieve 19 messages. A bit slower than WiFi, but totally acceptable.

Photos

I took a photo (above) and mailed it to my sister. This was surprisingly speedy – comparable to my MacBook Pro at home. The huge display made composing my shot very easy, and the view of my subject was interrupted only by a the button to snap the photo and another to jump to an album of photos taken with the iPhone. In fact, the iPhone's display is significantly larger than that of my digital camera. There's no comparison to a real camera, of course, but the iPhone is absolutely qualified for taking nice looking, on-the-spot snapshots.

Email And Web

I loaded a few websites, and some were quicker than others. For instance, the busy NBC.com was a bit slower than a few less "busy" weblogs. Interestingly, Newsvine.com automatically forwarded me to the mobile version of their site. Even though I was on EDGE, none of the sites I visited required an inordinate amount of time to load.

Needless to say, I was feeling good about the iPhone. Time to make a call.

The Killer App: Making Calls

The included headphones feature an integrated mic that is so impressive to me, I can't adequately explain it. It hangs just below the right earbud and seems too small and too far away from the wearer's mouth to be effective. Not so.

While listening to "My Morning Jacket" and strolling the main drag, I called my sister (mostly because she LOVES to talk, and as such would be a willing guinea pig). The music automatically faded out, and I put the iPhone back into my pocket as her phone started to ring. She answered, and we began to chat. In fact, she thought I was on my land line until I told her otherwise! Did I mention I was outdoors using the headphone mic? Awesome.

I switched to the iPhone's built-in earpiece and mic, then to speaker phone and back again, all during the call – she never noticed. The audio was clear and strong on my end as well.

With her chatting away on speaker (she REALLY likes to talk), I browsed my calendar, looked at photos, played with the weather widget...without effecting the call in any way. I was amazed.

I then asked her to call me. I ended the call and the music picked right up where I left off about 15 minutes prior. Soon enough, it faded again to "ring." With a simple click of the earbud mic I was back on the phone.

How Many Bars You Got?

My access varied from 1 to 5 bars as I walked around, but I never lost email or internet. Email was VERY slow at 1 bar, but it still did its job. Also, while phone calls got a bit "jumpy" at 1 bar, the call never dropped.

So, my day with the iPhone was satisfying and fun. The UI is so snappy, the display so bright and the screen just so darn fun to touch that I've fallen in love with this little computer. And that's the sense one gets: The iPhone is a portable computer that just happens to make phone calls, not a phone that performs a few tricks.

When I consider that this is the iPhone's initial release, I marvel: A few years from now, the iPhone as we know it will seem as archaic as the 1st generation iPod. Now that's exciting.