Apple iPhone 3G Cell Phone Review - Making/Receiving Calls

Dialing a number on the iPhone 3G isn't particularly slow, but it's not super fast either. The call management options are good and we like that Apple upped the ring volume by a few decibels, although it's still a bit low for our tastes.

Dialing Speed (5.29)
Dialing a number on the Apple iPhone 3G took an average of 3.78 seconds. You can see below that this is right about average and amongst our comparison phones only the BlackBerry Curve 8320 performed better. Average is decent from a touch screen device, especially since you have to press two buttons to get to the dialing pad, first phone, then the dialing pad tab in the phone application. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Dialing Speed (sec)

Send and End Buttons (5.0)
The send and end buttons on the iPhone 3G are exactly the same as the original iPhone. When you dial a number there's a green Call button at the bottom center of the screen. When you are in a call there's a big red end call button at the bottom of the screen. Both are easy to hit and very clear about what they do, but as virtual buttons they suffer from a complete lack of tactile feedback.

Call Management (7.0)
The iPhone 3G's call management features are basically unchanged, which isn't a terrible thing as they're pretty good. In the phone application there is a tab at the bottom to see your recent calls. Here you'll see a chronological list of calls with an arrow to the right of the number/contact name that will allow you to see additional details. Unfortunately there's still no way of deleting individual call records, you can clear the entire list with the button at the top right, but that's it. Filtering options are also unchanged, there's a button to see missed calls specifically, but no way to just see incoming or outgoing calls. In fact there's not even an indicator next to the call that tells you if it's incoming or outgoing, instead you have to look at the specific call record. From the detailed page you can also text message the number, create a new contact or add the number to existing contacts. You can see total call and data counters in the Settings under General - Usage.

During a call you find six big buttons in the center of the screen. These give you access to Mute, Keypad, Speakerphone, Add a Call, Hold the Call and go to Contacts. The iPhone is also a multi-tasking platform that will allow you to access other features during a call. Thanks to the 3G network you can also browse the web during a call, something the older iPhone wasn't able to do. You still can't record a call, but aside from that the in-call features are very good. Overall we'd say the call management features on the iPhone 3G are solid, there are only a couple of omissions and most users will find their needs met.

Startup to Call (2.68)
One of the pains that comes with beecoming a more powerful and complex platform is that there's more to load at startup. It seems that this has started to bite the iPhone 3G as it took us an average of 37.3 seconds to start the phone up and make a call. You can see below that this is significantly slower than the original iPhone and amongst our comparison phones only the Nokia N95, another powerful smart phone, took anywhere near as long. Of course the BlackBerry Curve 8320 is also a powerful smart phone and it took seven seconds, but RIM is just really good at this. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Startup to Call (sec)

Ring Volume (8.86)
The Apple iPhone 3G's ring volume has improved slightly over last year, something Apple said they were going to do. We measured it at 88.6 decibles, you can see below that this is just under four decibels louder than we say a year ago, but it's still significantly below average and lower than all our other comparison phones. We still worry that it might be too easy to miss a call on the iPhone 3G if you're in a particularly noisy environment.

Decibels

Ringtones (1.0)
When last year's iPhone was released there was no way to add your own ringtones to the device. Today that's changed slightly. You can purchase ringtones, which includ the full version of the song, for $1.99 off of the iTunes store, but you have to do that on your desktop and sync them over. We don't award points for ring tones you have to pay for, but it's a nice feature that some people may take advantage of. More important for our purposes is that you can now take any song on a Mac and use the Garage Band software to create a ring tone out of it. This is nowhere near as good as the Nokia N95, which allows you to use any song on the device as a ring tone, but we thought it was worth a point. Windows users are out of luck without falling back on hacks and/or third party software.

Non Audio Alerts (7.0)
The vibrate alert on the Apple iPhone 3G is pretty good, not quite as good as what we saw from the LG Dare, but better than what we got from the original iPhone. The screen also lights up when you get a call, but it's pretty muted and you can miss it unless you're looking right at the phone.

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