Apple iPhone Cell Phone Review - Messaging

Alfredo Padilla
Published on June 29, 2007 Comment on this

Supported Email Services (8.0)

When you create a new email account in the settings you are prompted to choose a Yahoo, Gmail, .Mac or AOL account. Each only requires your username and password. The iPhone will also synchronize the email accounts from your computer to the phone, a nice extra feature that will keep most people from having to go into the technical details of outgoing and incoming services. You can also enter your own server information for any POP or IMAP account. There is support for Exchange server, but only for IMAP email from Exchange. There is no support for Activesync, which allows you to get mail in realtime and synchronize things like contacts and your calendar.

Apple iPhone	BlackBerry 8800	Helio Ocean

LG Prada	Nokia N95	Treo 750

Push Email (1.0)
The iPhone does not support standard push email services like Exchange or BlackBerry, which is something we're sure many business users out there are saddened by. It does support push email via IMAP, although most IMAP email services don't offer the capability. As Apple announced in January when the iPhone was revealed, Yahoo's IMAP email will support this feature, giving non-corporate users an alternative that few other handsets have offered. Still, we would have much preferred to see the iPhone support standards like BlackBerry and Exchange. The absence of this kind of support leaves the iPhone behind BlackBerry devices like the 8800 or Windows Mobile devices like the Treo 750. Even the Nokia N95, a consumer-oriented device, has free software available that allows you to interact with BlackBerry or Exchange servers.

Multiple Email Accounts (10.0)
The iPhone supports multiple email accounts, up to the five that we test for. This is important as folks nowadays often have multiple email accounts.

HTML and Attachments (10.0)

The iPhone is one of the first phones to offer the ability to view HTML email on your handset. This is a feature that has been added to Windows Mobile devices in the latest version, but is still not included in Symbian Series 60 handsets. HTML email allows you to view emails as they are meant to be seen, rather than in a broken text only version. The iPhone also allows you to access several attachment types. There is support for viewing PDF, Word and Excel documents, however there is no support for zip files and PowerPoint presentations. We hope that Apple adds support for the latter two in the future. Still, there was much speculation that none of these file types would be supported.

Email Customizations (6.0)
The iPhone offers a very good selection of options for customizing your email. You can change the number of lines that are displayed for each item in the message list, change your font size and create signatures for outgoing emails. These are more options than most "smart" phones have. The BlackBerry 8800 and Treo 750 only allow you to add signatures as an email customization option. This is one place where the iPhone stands above traditional messaging devices. Although it should be noted that the BlackBerry 8800 and Treo 750 both offer you the option to change font size universally.

Time to a New Message (10.53)

To test how easy it is to create a new email message we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have a new email dialogue on the screen. We repeat this five times and take the average for our score. The iPhone took an average of 1.9 seconds to complete this test. This is a very good score, only beat out by the BlackBerry 8800 by about 15 hundredths of a second and slightly better than the Ocean, Prada and Treo 750. It is significantly better than the Nokia N95, which took a very long 4.4 seconds. We were very pleased with the iPhone's performance. In terms of creating new emails it is just as good as any messaging centric device out there. Of course typing an email out may be another issue. Check out our Hardware section to see how the keyboard performs.

Handset	Time (sec)	Score
Apple iPhone	1.9	10.53
Blackberry 8800	1.76	11.36
Helio Ocean	2.10	9.76
LG Prada	2.42	8.26
Nokia N95	4.40	4.55
Palm Treo 750	2.23	8.97

Email Usability (8.0)

The iPhone's email interface is fairly straightforward. When you launch the program you are shown a list of messages in the currently activated account. You can hit the mailboxes button on the upper left to go back to a list of folders and accounts. As is standard on the iPhone interface you can scroll through the messages by merely flicking your finger up or down. Tapping on a message will allow you to view it. There are on-screen controls for functions like deleting, responding or composing a new message. You can also delete a message in the inbox view by swiping your finger across it. You can limit how many messages are loaded for each account, however there are no options to sort your messages, which are organized by time of arrival.

When you create a new message you are given a new message dialogue and the on-screen keyboard pops up. You are shown the To: and Cc: fields but there is no Bcc: field. Simply start typing in the addresses you want to send to, add a subject and body, and hit the send button to send the message along. You can also add contacts from your address book by hitting the + symbol in the To: field. Commonly used symbols like @ and . are easily accessible on the keyboard.

The iPhone does support auto completion of names when you type them into the To: field in email. This is a nice feature that has been standard on Windows Mobile Professional phones like the Treo 750 and is also found on the BlackBerry 8800. It is not available on Symbian Series 60 devices or most other handsets.

Overall we found the interface very usable. However, it wasn't any more impressive in terms of functionality than the Treo 750 or BlackBerry 8800. It's also missing options compares to these phones, such as the ability to sort your messages by sender and size or add blind carbon copies.

Update: After using the iPhone's email features for a few days now we've found a couple of issues that are worth mentioning. The first is that there is no way to delete a large number of emails at once. Instead when you are in edit mode you will need to hit the "-" sign next to the message and then confirm the deletion. This is annoying, especially for those who need to delete large numbers of spam emails.

The second issue is in switching between accounts. Unlike BlackBerries, which provide a unified inbox, the iPhone has separate folder structures for each account. This means that you will need to back out to the accounts list to view messages in another account. We much prefer the Windows Mobile system that allows you to switch between accounts by using the left/right on the directional pad. Of course the iPhone lacks a directional pad, but we hope Apple adds some functionality to make switching between accounts easier as the current method is onerous, especially for those who want to manage several email accounts on their device.

As a result of these issues we have deducted a point from the iPhone's original email usability score.

Supported IM Services (0.0)
The Apple iPhone does not support any instant messaging services. This is surprising given that instant messaging is a more or less standard feature on most phones. We do have to admit that carriers usually gouge you by charging you for SMS messages when you use IM, but certainly on smart phones you can get programs like Agile Messenger to use your data connection to send instant messages without those extra charges. There is an online app called iPhoneChat that is designed for the iPhone that gives you limited access to AIM. We hope that Apple adds a robust client for IM in the future.

MMS Support (0.0)
Curiously the iPhone does not support MMS. This is a strange omission as we are certain that AT&T would have liked to charge customers for the privilege of sending photos to others. People have argued that you can just send the photo via email, but this overlooks the fact that most people are able to receive an MMS message any time, while you certainly don't have access to your email all the time (all those who are saying that everyone will be carrying an iPhone soon can come back to reality now). We hope this is an area where Apple makes the effort to improve functionality in the future as its a shame to have a phone with all of the multimedia features of the iPhone without the ability to send MMS messages.

SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (0.0)
To test whether a phone interprets smileys as graphical icons or leaves them in text format we send four common emoticons to the phone. We were disappointed that the iPhone left these emoticons in text format rather than showing graphical representations as on the Treo 750 and many other phones.

SMS/MMS Ease of Use (4.0)

The SMS application on the iPhone provides threaded SMS conversations. When you open the application you are presented with a list of currently ongoing with the name of the contact listed. A blue dot next to the name indicates that there is a new message. Tapping on one of the conversations takes you to the threaded view, with sent and received messages shown in alternating bubbles. At the top of the conversation are buttons that allow you to call the contact or see their contact information. At the bottom of the screen is the text entry field. Tapping on this will bring up the on-screen keyboard. There is a clear button in the upper left that clears all of the messages sent or received.

In the list of ongoing conversations you can delete a whole session by using the edit button or you can swipe your finger across a conversation. Starting a new conversation can be done by hitting the compose button in the upper left of the conversation list. Unfortunately the SMS program has some serious drawbacks despite all of its graphical niceties. First of all you can't delete individual messages sent or received, meaning that you have to decide to keep an entire conversation or get rid of it all. We also found that you cannot send text messages to multiple users or groups. This is a standard feature on just about every cell phone in the world so we are surprised to see its lack on the iPhone.

Probably the best comparison for the iPhone in this area are Treos, which also have a threaded SMS app. We found that the Treos' application provides much more capabilities in an interface that's just as easy to use. The iPhone's SMS application is sufficient to send or receive a quick text message, but its limitations will frustrate power texters.

Time to a New SMS Message (3.82)

To test how easy it is to send a text message we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have a new SMS message dialogue up. We repeat this test five times and take the average for our score. The iPhone took an average of 2.62 seconds to get a new SMS dialogue up on the screen. The table below compares the iPhone's score in this test to several other handsets. As you can see the iPhone performed middling in this test, beat out by the Prada, Treo 750 and the N95's excellent time of .9 seconds. The BlackBerry 8800 and Helio Ocean did slightly worse than the iPhone. We were not particularly impressed with the iPhone's time in this test. It was also one of the few places where we detected lag in the interface as it took a noticeable length of time for the SMS application to recognize our presses after we launched it.

Handset	Time (sec)	Score
Apple iPhone	2.62	3.82
Blackberry 8800	3.82	2.62
Helio Ocean	3.10	4.76
LG Prada	2.36	4.24
Nokia N95	0.90	11.11
Palm Treo 750	2.36	4.24

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