Apple iPhone 3G Cell Phone Review - Software

iPhone 2.0 is a major software upgrade that brings native third party applications and several other small but helpul improvements. It basically moves the iPhone 3G from the realm of a standard cell phone to the world of high end smart phones.

OS (7.0)
The iPhone's operating system was classified as a closed proprietary operating system by us last year. The biggest change a year down the line is that the OS has been opened up to allow third party applications. This now puts it in the same class as other advanced platforms like Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Palm OS. We now feel comfortable calllin the Apple iPhone 3G a true smart phone. The interface on the iPhone 3G is still as easy to use and attractive as ever, and there have been small upgrades throughout that improve functionality like the ability to move around icons on the home screen and search through contacts. Apple has taken a big step forward with their iPhone 2.0 software, it's now the platform that we all hoped it would be a year ago.

Home Screen Score (7.0)
The Apple iPhone 3G's home screen is an array of icons, sixteen can fit on the screen by default. The icons are dynamic, so for example when you receive new email messages you will see a badge appear on the email icon with the total number of unread messages. In an upgrade that was released since we reviewed last year's model the iPhone now supports multiple home screens. Swipe your finger across the screen to move to the next or previous set of icons. The four icons on the bottom of the screen remain the same on every screen. With the addition of the iPhone Apps store this is an important feature as we're sure that many people will quickly accumulate many application icons. Also new is the ability to rearrange the icons, press and hold on any icon and they start shaking, allowing you to move them about and delete installed applications. You can also add shortcuts to web pages on the home screen, another new feature that came in the past year via a software update.

The home screen is something of a cross between the dynamic home screens you see on Windows Mobile devices and Nokia S60 phones like the N95 and the more statis home screens seen on Palm OS or BlackBerry devices. On the former home screens you have plugins that give you a lot of information like upcoming appointment, tasks and shortcuts to various functions. The Palm OS and BlackBerry home screens, by contrast, are a simple collection of application icons. The dynamic icons on the iPhone 3G add some of the ability to get information at a glance, but still falls short of the information you can get from  phones like the Nokia N95.

Extensibility (4.0)
This is the big one, the one that we've all been waiting for. When the original iPhone launched last year everyone immediately recognized that it was a platform, not just a standard cell phone. Unfortunately Apple wasn't ready for third party applications with that launch, and in fact we're here over a year later and we're just now getting native third party applications. Obviously this is a hard thing to do and we're very happy that Apple moved in this direction rather than keeping the phone completely locked down.

With the launch of the app store yesterday the new iPhone 3G, and the older iPhone with a software upgrade, support native third party applications. This puts it in the same company as other advanced mobile platforms like Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS and BlackBerry OS. A very nice feature of the iPhone's new application store is that you can access it directly from the device, in fact all applications are available exclusively via the app store, with a couple of minor exceptions, so you're one button press away from looking through all the applications available for your iPhone 3G.

When you launch the application store you are taken to a now familiar tabbed interface. The five tabs along the bottom are Featured, Categories, Top 25, Search and Updates. These The first four are self-explanatory, but the last deserves some explanation. One of the very nice new features of the iPhone's app store is that any app you have installed will automatically check for updates and you will be notified when they become available in this tab.

The support for third party applications isn't perfect, in particular there are a couple of major limitations. The first is that third party applications don't have access to system level functions, so it's impossible to write a home screen plugin or an application that will do copy & paste throughout the interface. You calso can't enhance existing applications. The second major drawback is that applications can't run in the background. Both of these are capabilities that are found on the other platforms we mentioned above and frankly we find Apple's arguments against them to be thin. Still, even despite these drawbacks the addition of native third party applications is a huge plus for the iPhone 3G, and we're very happy to see it.

Customizability (3.5)
The original iPhone had a limited selection of customization options. You can still set the wallpaper you see when you are unlocking the phone, but there's still no global changes for font size or type. Software upgrades have brought a few other customization options, however, which we mention in the home screen section above. These include the ability to move around the application icons and add bookmarks directly to your home screen. This still isn't very impressive, there's no support for themes and you can't change the background on your home screen, things most phones can do, but we'll take the improvements.

OS Responsivness (6.0)
The original iPhone was remarkable in how responsive the operating system was. With the new iPhone 3G running the 2.0 version of the operating system we've noticed that responsiveness has become more of a mixed bag. We notice more lag when interacting with the interface, and this is borne out by some of our timing tests. On the other hand in some places it is actually faster. Stability is also a concern, we've already had a couple of crashes with the iPhone 2.0 software, and this doesn't seem to be an experience unique to us. We have noticed that stability is better in some areas, for example we were able to have two large web pages open while listening to music and neither of them were cleared from memory, something we couldn't do on the older iPhone with the previous software. We don't know if these improvements are related to the software upgrade or to an increase in processor and RAM in the device. We suspect that the newness of the software upgrade has a lot to do with any issues, and we hope to see fixes in the near future from Apple. For now, however, we have to lower the iPhone 3G's responsiveness score a bit.

Browser Features (5.5)
The Apple iPhone 3G uses the same Safari web browser that Apple touts as the most advanced mobile web browser out there. They may be right in terms of interface, we'll talk about that below, but in terms of web technologies supported it's just not true. Safari supports standard HTML pages, but does not support mobile WAP pages. Javascript is supported, as are images, encryption and cookies. New with the latest software upgrade is the ability to save a photo to  your phone, just press and hold to enable this. Still missing are support for Flash, Java, Frames, RSS feeds and Password Management. Compare this to S60 Web on a phone like the Nokia N95 that supports Flash, RSS and password management and Safari just isn't the best in terms of features.

Browsing Interface (9.5)
The browsing interface for Safari on the iPhone 3G is amongst the best we've ever seen on a mobile browser. Helped enormously by the large display Safari renders web pages just as they would appear on your computer (as long as they don't use Flash anyways). At first you get an overview of the page, but you can just double tap on any element to zoom in and use your fingers to pan about. This is a similar idea to the overview you get on many other advanced mobile browsers, but is much more elegant and easy to use.

The bookmarks on Safari are also very good, you can order them in any way you wan and you can also organize them into folders. The browsing history is a folder at the top level of the bookmarks and is a simple list of sites you've visited. When looking at a web page the at the bottom of the screen you'll see browsing controls: forward, back, plus (for adding bookmarks, emailing links and adding pages to your home screen), bookmarks and a new tab button. That last, of course, indicates that you can have multiple tabs open in Safari, a very nice feature. At the top of the screen is the address bar with a refresh button to the left and a search button to the right. Tapping on the address bar will bring up the keyboard so you can enter a web address and will also reveal the Google search bar just below it. Overall the browsing interface on Safari is, in our opinion, the best mobile browsing experience currently available. Safari may not be able to handle all the web pages out there, but those it can will look great.

Browser Access (10.0)
It takes only four steps to go from the home screen unlocked until we have browsed to our site. Simply tap on the Safari button, then tap on the address bar to enter the address and then hit th Go button at the bottom left of the keyboard. You can see below that this is the best amongst our comparison phones. We use steps in this test rather than a timed test as we don't want network issues to interfere. Entering the address is considered a single step.

Steps to Browse to Wirelessinfo

Gaming (3.33)
The Apple iPhone 3G does not ship with a single full version game, an omission that we still find annoying. Thankfully you can quickly alleviate this problem as there are quite a few games already available in the new apps store. Controlling your game is a bit difficult to judge for the iPhone 3G. Of course there is no D-Pad or soft keys, all controls are on screen or take advantage of the acceleromoter. In our experience with a couple of downloaded games it seems that developers are doing a decent job, but certainly these non-standard controls impose certain limitations on game development. The iPhone has the potential to be a very strong gaming platform, but it's not a gaurantee yet.

Calculator (7.0)
The Apple iPhone 3G's calculator has received a nice update over the original with the iPhone 2.0 software. When your first launch the calculator you get same simple interface we saw a  year ago. Rotate the phone, however, and you get a much more capable scientific calculator with suport for exponents, logs, trigonometric functions and a bunch of other stuff we frankly don't understand. Math nuts will much appreciate this upgrade and the new calculator is amongst the best we've seen on a cell phone.

Alarm (8.0)
The iPhone 3G allows you to create an unlimited number of alarms in the Clock application. Each alarm can have its own sound and complex recurrence patterns, which is good. Unfortunately snooze is limited to a ten minute time period that can't be changed, but apart from this we are very happy with the iPhone 3G's alarm software.

Document Software (0.0)
The Apple iPhone 3G still does not include any software to view or edit office documents. This is dissapointing as document editing has been a staple of advanced smart phones for years. You can view PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and iWork documents, but only if they are attached to a message. There's no interface to just go and look at documents separate from email.

Other Software (2.0)
In addition to the software discussed above the iPhone 3G has a couple of other applications that we think are worth points. The first of these is Google Maps, which integrates with the GPS functionality on the iPhone 3G and gives you local search and directions. We'll get more into depth on that in the Other Features section when we talk about GPS. The other software of note is the YouTube application, which allows you to search for and stream YouTube videos.

Previous    Next