Apple iPhone 3G S Cell Phone Review - Messaging

The iPhone 3G S has support for a wide variety of email and other messaging services, including working out of the box with Microsoft Exchange mail servers.

Supported Email Services (8.0)
As we've come to expect from iPhones the 3G S does an excellent job with supporting email standards. There's support for standard POP and IMAP accounts, as well as auto setup for AOL, Yahoo and Gmail. Unfortunately Hotmail is still not available, perhaps unsurprisingly. There are also presets for setting up Apple's Mobile Me account and Exchange accounts, but we'll get into that below.

Push Email (5.0)
The Apple iPhone 3G S includes full support for push email via Exchange, Mobile Me or Yahoo accounts, that last via the IMAP Idle function. There is no support for BlackBerry servers.

Multiple Email Accounts (10.0)
The iPhone can support as many email accounts as you wish, although you are limited to a single Exchange and Mobile Me account.

HTML and Attachments (11.0)
The Apple iPhone 3G S's email interface supports viewing full HTML email, as well as support for viewing (but not editing) Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF attachements. Unfortunatley there's still no support for zip files.

Email Customizations (6.0)
The Apple iPhone 3G S allows you to adjust the font size of emails, allows you to control how many lines of an email are shown in the inbox and supports creating signatures for outgoing emails, although it doesn't allow you to create separate signatures for different accounts. There's no support for changing the font size, color or type.

Time to a New Email Message (12.99)
Displaying its new speed once again we were able to get a new email dialogue up on the Apple iPhone 3G S in just 1.54 seconds. This is amongst the best we've ever seen from a phone, even faster than the original iPhone, and almost half as long as the iPhone 3G. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Email Usability (9.0)
The Apple iPhone 3G S retains all of the nice usability features of previous iPhones, with a couple of significant upgrades and a couple of annoyances that haven't gone away. The good is that you can easily scroll through and select messages with your finger in typical iPhone fashion. The upgrades are support for search in mail, finally, although it is limited to header information so you can't search for items in the body of a message. You can, however, extend your search to your email server. The second nice upgrade is the ability to type out emails using the landscape keyboard.

The annoyances that remain include the fact that navigating between email accounts is still an incredible pain, come on Apple you can do better than this. There are also no options for sorting your messages by sender, size, etc.

Instant Messaging (0.0)
The Apple iPhone 3G S does not include an instant messaging client built-in.

MMS Support (0.0)
Ah, MMS, we wondered how we were going to handle this. On the one hand the new iPhone 3.0 software, which is found on the 3G S, has full support for multimedia messaging (finally). On the other hand AT&T in their wisdom have decided not to support this feature until later in the year. As such we've decided to award zero points.

Once MMS is up and working for AT&T customers it will be full integrated with SMS in the messaging application, which we like. It will also be exceedingly simply to send a photo or video from the camera interface or the photo album software.

SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (0.0)
Still no smilies, which makes us :(.

SMS/MMS Ease of Use (8.0)
The messaging application, which is used for SMS and, eventually, MMS has also received some updates with the 3.0 software, the most important of which is the ability to delete individual messages. Previously you had to delete an entire conversation. It's still an excellent threaded view, and since last year there is support for sending messages to multiple people. And since both SMS and MMS are integrated into the same view there's no bother with switching between accounts or folders.

Time to a New SMS Message (4.63)
Not quite as speedy as getting to a new email message, it took us an average of 2.16 seconds to get to a new text message dialogue on the iPhone 3G S. This is still faster than its predecessors, however, and amongst our comparison phones only the Samsung Memoir did better. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

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