After all the hype on the iPhone for the past 6 months we were finally able to get our hands on one Friday afternoon at the Apple Store in Albany, NY. Without beating around the bush here are our impressions of the iPhone.

Initial impressions

The iPhone is extremely sexy, elegant and incredibly easy to use as a phone and an iPod. The screen is incredibly sharp and high res for any phone, iPod or handheld device. The glass didn’t smudge like we thought it would either. The iPhone just feels great in your hand!

The iPod

Being that we’re huge iPod addicts the iPod was the first thing we checked out while using the iPhone. The iPod on the iPhone is amazing. In fact, we’d say that it’s the best iPod yet. We love the cover flow navigation and extra large album art, as well as being able to select a group of letters to automatically scroll to. For example, if your looking for an artist who’s name starts with a “J” you can just touch the area on the right side of the screen containing the letters IJKL and you’ll be very close to the artist your looking for. This is something the current iPods will never be able to do, even though Apple has made things fairly easy by displaying the letters as you scroll down with the iPod’s touchpad.

Watching videos from iTunes is much nicer on the iPhone than on any iPod, especially if the video is in widescreen format.

Unfortunately the iPhones built in speakers aren’t very loud, so don’t expect your iPhone to be a replacement for headphones or external speakers.

The Phone

The iPhone actually turned out to be a great phone! Go figure. The dialing interface is extremely easy to use and has some great features. Our favorite was the conference call feature, which is awesome and very easy to use. Adding contact is easy to use and associating photos with contacts is almost too easy.

Visual voicemail is amazing! We never want to have to dial into a voicemail system again.

As we said with the iPod feature on the iPhone, the speaker on the iPhone isn’t very loud, so we we’re a little disappointed with it while in speakerphone mode. Also, we weren’t able to figure out how to delete a single entry from your missed call or recent call list. There’s an option to clear everything but we we didn’t want to delete everything, just one number. Come on, Apple. This is basic stuff.

Oh, and the iPhone ringtones are all pretty boring.

Safari

Apple boasts that Safari is the first real browser ever on a mobile phone. It really is a nice to have an almost full-featured web browser on the iPhone. However it’s still not what we consider a full-featured web browser since it doesn’t support Java or Flash. So don’t think that you can go to YouTube.com in Safari and watch YouTube videos because it won’t work. That’s what the YouTube application is for. It is nice having javascript support though.

Apple made it easy to zoom in and move around web sites with your fingertips on the iPhone. Most web pages with a lot of text are hard to read or click links in portrait mode so we mostly used landscape mode. The good news is that when you do need to zoom in on a web page everything comes up very clear and crisp. We did notice a few times when the iPhone didn’t want to rotate the screen from portrait to landscape mode and sometimes we thought the screen wasn’t going to rotate but it just took a few seconds. It also turned out to be a littler easier for us to type using the on screen keyboard while in landscape mode, since the keys appear to be a little bigger and further apart, resulting in fewer mistakes. The on screen keyboard features a “.com” button when using Safari which helped us save a lot of time when typing URL’s since we still weren’t used to the keyboard.

Safari features a built in search field for easily searching Google or Yahoo. I wonder how Microsoft feels about being left out?

SMS Text Messaging

The iPhone’s SMS app is very simple. The iPhone keeps track of conversations with your contacts in an iChat like interface, logging the whole conversation from start to finish, which is nice. We know it’s cheesy but even the animation showing you that your text message is being sent is slick. It’s nicer than the 5 second pause my Blackberry gives me.

Writing an email or a text message are the most typing intensive applications on the iPhone so we think now would be a good time to go into further detail on the on-screen keyboard.

The keyboard feels a little cramped to us, but that may be because we’re long time Blackberry users. It was very hard for us to jump right into using two thumbs on the iPhone. We found ourselves having to pluck away with one finger. After a few hours of use we were much more confident with using two thumbs on the iPhone keyboard but still made mistakes, bringing me to my next point - typing correction. We’re not sure what the big deal with the typing correction is, because we didn’t really find it to be very helpful, since we still made plenty of mistakes at first.

EDGE & WiFi

Lot’s of people complained about AT&T’s EDGE network in the iPhone reviews we read, but for us EDGE seemed pretty snappy. It’s nowhere near as fast as EVDO or WiFi, but it seemed to work fine for us for casual web browsing and YouTube videos.

We found that being able to use WiFi on the iPhone was one of its best features. WiFi was extremely was to setup and ran every fast. As Borat would say… “Very nice!”

YouTube

The iPhone’s YouTube app is one of the best things about the iPhone. The interface is very much like the Apple TV interface and videos looked really good on the high res screen! The videos even seemed to load fairly quickly over EDGE. The “special codec” YouTube is using for the iPhone videos turned out to be nice. We’d like to know how small the file sizes are compared to regular YouTube videos.

Photos

The iPhone’s photo app is, for lack of a better word, great. Dragging and zooming in on things with the iPhone’s touchscreen seems to be the most useful with this photo app. Its way to much fun to zoom in and move around photos. From within the photo app it’s also very easy to assign photos to contacts.

Google Maps

Google Maps is a little less exciting to us since the iPhone doesn’t have GPS to help navigate you or tell you where you are currently. The interface Apple put together on top of Google’s API is very sleek though. Google Maps did seem a little slower over EDGE if you’re constantly zooming in and out or dragging around a map.

Weather, Calculator & Stocks

The weather application confused the heck out of us at first because we didn’t know how to view the weather reports in other cities we setup. After a minute or two of complaining we figured out you just scroll to the side to scroll through weather reports for the configured cities.

The calculator app was extremely simple to use with it’s large on screen buttons.

If you’ve used the stock widget that comes with OS X before, then you know all there is to know about this application. It’s as simple as can be.

The Camera

We tried to get photos from the iPhone to our email but we didn’t want our email stored on a random display model iPhone. But the photos we took with the iPhone’s built in camera looked better than any other camera phone we’ve used in the past. Did we mention that it has a really cool James Bondish animation when you snap a photo?

Coolest Feature

In the phone application you can see more city and state information on the numbers you called and the numbers that called you. If you’ve ever gotten a call from a number that you didn’t recognize, this could be a big help! We just wish they would add this information on the screen while the call is coming in, instead of making you look it up in your call logs.

Worst Feature

It’s easy to screw up when using the keyboard at first. Typing using two thumbs takes confidence and a few hours or days of use to get comfortable with.

We want to emphasize that this still isn’t terrible, it just takes some time to get used to!

Closing remarks

After using the iPhone for upwards of two hours we feel like the iPhone lives up to the hype even with the high $499 and $599 price tags. Every aspect of the iPhone is incredibly easy to use and is heavily focused on having a rich multimedia experience, which is something not a lot of phones have ever focused on up until this point.

If your looking for more information on the iPhone or to see the iPhone in action check out Apple’s site at http://www.apple.com/iphone

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a great post on how to get a prepaid iPhone - guaranteed. If you sign up using iTunes and enter your social security number as 999-99-9999 (obviously an invalid social security number) your credit check will fail and you’ll be prompted to sign up under AT&T’s prepaid GoPhone service. I’m sure thousands of iPhone users who don’t want to be locked into contract with AT&T will find this to be very useful.

Below are the GoPhone pricing plans for the iPhones.

Via TUAW.com

One of our favorite applications on the iPhone is, go figure, the phone! It’s an extremely simple but well-done app. One of the hidden features of the iPhones phone application, that hasn’t been mentioned anywhere else yet, is it’s advanced Caller ID which we dubbed “Super Caller ID.”

After placing or receiving a call on the iPhone you can go into the phone applications recent calls menu and select an individual call and be brought to a menu like the one seen below.

Notice anything interesting? Directly underneath the phone number there’s a line giving you the area where the phone number’s located! In this example, the phone number displayed is a Nextel cell phone from the Ventura, CA area, and the iPhone came back with the number being from the “Northern Los Angeles Area.” We also did a few other tests and the iPhone was extremely accurate with cell phone and landline numbers from around the New York Metro area.

It’s a shame that the iPhone doesn’t automatically display this information on incoming calls. We’re sure we’re not the only ones who get calls from numbers in area codes that we’re not familiar with. The iPhones super Caller ID feature could be a big help to a lot of people and a major selling point of the phone for many consumers. Alltel recently introduced a similar enhanced Caller ID service, called City ID, available only on certain handsets with an additional monthly fee. Our guess is that the iPhone has a built in database for this super Caller ID function, because it wouldn’t make sense to constantly retrieve this information over EDGE. So why hasn’t Apple boasted about this super Caller ID feature anywhere yet? We love it.