Favorites
RSSUsing iPhone Jobs said that this was the best iPod the company has ever made, and we have to say, we completely agree. We are not audiophiles, but from whatever we know about this phone till now, we think it is going to be at the top of the list of wants of every music listener this Christmas. The iPod makes full use of the touchscreen interface and managing and playing songs through the touchscreen seems so fluent and natural, it gives the impression you’re actually touching your music. The large widescreen is easily the best one to watch videos on. No longer does one need to squint on a tiny screen while watching videos on the move. Finding music seems to be faster due to the easily navigable interface, and the presence of OS X must mean more powerful searching and sorting features. The album art looks gorgeous on the large display, there is a built-in speaker and there is Cover Flow, for the first time on an iPod. And unlike in iTunes, the Cover Flow on the iPhone is actually useful, and we can see that becoming the preferred mode of browsing through their music for most iPhone owners.
Get Started With the new iPhone
To get started with the iPod, you push an orange iPod icon on the lower right hand corner of the iPhone screen. Once in the iPod interface, we see five buttons across the bottom—Playlists, Artists, Songs, Videos, and More. The first feature one needs to be acquainted with is the scrolling. To scroll through a list of anything, you just place a finger lightly onto the screen and flick it in the direction we want to scroll to. So if you want to scroll the list of songs up, you just flick your finger in the upward direction and it scrolls like butter. The animation gives you a feel that it is rubber banding up and down.
Playing Songs on iPhone , creating play lists
To play a song, you click on the “Artist” button, scroll through the artists and tap on the one you want, and a list of albums pops up, followed by a list of the songs for the album you chose. Now there is a “Shuffle” option at the top. You can either hit that to play the whole album in any order or simply chose the song you want to play. What follows is not only a treat for the ears, but for the eyes as well. The name of the artist, followed by the title of the song and the album is displayed in a bar at the top. There is a “Back” button to go back to the list of songs and a flip button to rotate the gorgeous album art displayed below. If you intend to buy an iPhone when it comes out, it is time to start tagging that cluttered library properly along with the album art. It will be worth it. The Previous, Play/Pause and Next buttons are at the bottom of the display followed by the volume control bar. For some reason, there seems to be no indication of the length of the track or the current playback position on this screen. This is quite odd, and we can only hope that they include those in the final shipping version. When you flip the album art around, you can see all the tracks in the current album complete with the track number and duration for each. At the top of the screen, there is a provision for rating the currently playing album on a scale of five stars, like in iTunes.Now comes the most interesting part: you can simply turn the phone around and hold it horizontally while the iPod is running. The phone senses the change in orientation, automatically switches to landscape mode, and displays Cover Flow. Here you can simply browse through the covers using the flicking gesture with your finger and tap on any cover to have it flip around and display the list of songs in the album. This is an added functionality, lacking in iTunes, and it makes Cover Flow very useful. Click on any song to start the playback. At the bottom left-hand corner of the Cover Flow screen is the Play/Pause button, and there is an “Info” button at the right-hand corner which, according to our presumptions, will show you all the relevant information about either the currently playing album/track or of the album which is at the forefront in the Cover Flow navigation. After you’re done, simply rotating the phone back to its upright state brings you to the currently playing screen described above.Of course, as with the iPod, you can make any number of playlists and play them conveniently. The “More” tab houses six other options—Albums, Audiobooks, Compilations, Composers, Games, and Podcasts. Selecting the “Albums” option lists all the albums stored on the phone in a list with a small thumbnail of the album art and the title of the each album. All the other options are pretty self-explanatory. The presence of the “Games” option indicates that Apple will develop games that take advantage of the iPhone’s huge touchscreen. However, this feature was not advertised at Macworld—maybe because no games has yet been developed that could be shown off to the audience.Watching Videos on iPhoneClicking on the “Videos” tab brings up all the videos stored on the phone. The videos are organised under the following categories—Movies, TV Shows, Music Videos, and Podcasts. Each video is represented by a thumbnail, the title, artist, episode number, and the length. Click on any video and it starts playing it in the landscape orientation. There is apparently no provision for playing movies in the vertical position (though we do not see any need for that). All of them are played in full screen mode with no controls to obstruct the view. Tapping on the screen brings up the onscreen controls. There is a “Done” button at the top left corner that takes you back to the list of videos followed by the scrub bar for jumping directly to any position in the video. You can see how much of the video has been played on the left side of the bar and the remaining duration on the right. There is a small button with two diagonal arrows facing each other but its function is not known as yet. Towards the bottom of the screen are the standard controls—Previous, Play/Pause, Next, and volume control. Widescreen movies are played with an aspect ratio of 16:10 by default (i.e. it takes up the whole screen and cutting out a little bit on both sides) and double-tapping on the screen while the movie is playing restores it to the default aspect ratio. Double-tap again to toggle back and forth. The iPhone also remembers how much a video has been played and if a video is quit in between and watched again a week later, it continues from that point on.Jobs describes the response he got from an Apple employee about the iPod functionality of the iPhone~”You know, I was showing this to somebody; I was giving a demo to somebody a little while ago who’d never seen this before inside Apple and I finished the demo, I said, ‘What do you think?’ He told me this—he said, ‘You had me at scrolling.’” Indeed, this seems to be the best portable media player in the market till date, and things are only going to get better with each revision. All in all, we think we can safely conclude that the iPhone truly excels in the media department.The iPhone Functions as a phone : For Calling and SMS
The iPhone comes loaded with a flashy and fully-functional iPod, and it works quite well. Many people will probably buy it solely for the widescreen iPod if is. But at the end of the day, it is a phone and if it does not perform well in that department, it might turn out to be a total failure. Apple claims that they have reinvented the phone. Let’s take a look.Calling and managing contacts on the iPhone is easy and convenient, or at least, that is what Jobs wants us to believe. There is a revolutionary new feature called Visual Voicemail. On the iPhone, you can view all your voicemails as you view your e-mail. You can also selectively listen to whichever ones you want in any order. There is no need to call a number and listen to five voice-mails serially. You can now browse through your voicemail. However, this is a feature that requires support from the network provider. Therefore, Apple has collaborated with Cingular (now acquired by AT&T) in the United States to provide this sendee to users. This means that this service might not be available in the Indian version of the phone because we do not have the system of having cell phones locked to certain carriers in India. However, it could also mean that Apple might strike a deal with Hutchison Essar (now acquired by Vodafone), Bharti Telecommunications (AirTel), or some other specific provider to facilitate this service in India. This would mean that the iPhone will either be locked to one particular carrier, or would support the visual voicemail feature only on one particular carrier.It is supposed to have excellent audio quality and is a quad-band GSM + EDGE phone. It lacks 3G though—but Apple plans to make 3G phones in’future. It also has Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) inbuilt.When you get a call, the name of the contact and where he/she is calling from (mobile, home, work, etc.) shows up on the top of the screen with your preferred wallpaper set as the background. At the bottom of the screen, there are two large buttons—a red “Decline” button on the left and a green “Answer” button on the right. And it rings, of course. Pushing the green icon at the lower left corner of the screen on the home screen brings up the phone application. There is a “+” button at the top for adding new contacts and five buttons across the bottom—Favourites, Recents, Contacts, Keypad, and Voicemail. We scroll through the list of contacts by flicking a finger across the screen. Tapping on any contact brings up all the details stored on the phone including, but not limited to, the photograph, all the phone numbers, e-mail addresses, home page, address, etc. There are two buttons at the top: “All Contacts” and “Edit”, and two at the bottom—”Text Message” and “Add to Favourites”. Clicking on any number initiates the call. When the calling screen shows up, you realise what Jobs meant when he said that they’d reinvented the phone. It has an extremely intuitive and thought-out interface. On top of the screen is the name and photograph of the caller followed with the status of the call and at the bottom is a huge red button called “End Call”. Right in the centre of the screen are six large buttons mute, keypad, speaker, add call, hold,, and contacts. There are no menus and no complicated options. You will no longer end up disconnecting the call while trying to call another number of turn off the speaker. And all of these buttons make use of subtle transparency which allows your wallpaper to show through! If a new call comes in while you are already busy on a call, there are two short beeps to indicate this and the pane in the centre (which houses the six options) smartly flips around to reveal two options—Ignore and Hold Call + Answer. The “End Call” button automatically changes to “End Call + Answer”, while the bar on the top reflects the caller’s name and photo and where he or she is calling from.On clicking “Hold Call + Answer”, the first caller is put on hold and the new call is activated. The bar on the top shows the names of both callers and the status of each call. The centre pane flips back but the “add call” button changes to “merge calls”. The red button at the bottom changes back to “End Call”. Tapping on any caller’s name at the top of the screen puts the other caller on hold and activates that call. Tap the “merge calls” key and so, you’ve created a conference call. The “merge calls” button changes back to “add call”. The bar at the top now shows the names of both callers along with the status of the call. There is a little arrow at the right side on the top. Tapping on it lists both the callers separately and there are little buttons next to each person’s name for disconnecting the call and making it private.Seeing the demo gave us the impression that everything is very well thought-out. The buttons are there when you need them and get out of the way when you don’t. Everything seems to be just one touch away. Adding any number to the list of favourites allows you to call them in just one click. To add a number to the favourites, you just tap the “+” button at the top right corner of the Favorites screen, and the list of all your contacts pops up. Tap on the contact whose number you want to add to your favourites, and a list of all his phone numbers comes up. It is interesting to note here that it does not display all the other information such as e-mail addresses, home page, etc. this time because they are not required. Tap on any number and it is added to the favourites list. There is an “Edit” button in the upper left-hand corner. Pushing that button allows you to move your favourites to different positions in the list and delete contacts from the favourites list.The “Recents” tab brings up all your recent phone calls. There are two tabs here—”All” and “Missed”, and a button for clearing the Recents list. The “All” tabs lists all the recent calls using different icons to denote dialled and received calls, and shows the missed calls in red. The “Missed” tab trims the list down to just the missed calls. If there have been more than one call to or from a number, it shows the number of calls in brackets. The time and date of all these calls is displayed adjacent to the names and tapping on any name places a call to that number.The “Keypad” tab brings up the keypad, which has really large keys for dialling the number, and a delete key for that deletes a single number on tapping it, and the whole number rapidly on holding the finger over it. The phone automatically formats the number as you dial it. There is a green key labelled “Call”, which places the call once the number is dialled. An Add button on the lower left lets you save the dialled number to the contacts list. The keypad, for some reason, also has the alphanumeric characters labelled over it. Since the phone features a virtual QWERTY keyboard, it is not clear what the alphanumeric characters on this keypad may be used for. They are probably just there to give it the feel of a real phone keypad.Next in line is the most unique feature of the iPhone’s phone application, one that is totally unique to the iPhone an industry first: visual voicemail. When you click on the “Voicemail” tab, you are faced with a really busy screen. At the top left is the “Greeting” tab, which lets you listen to and change your voicemail greeting that callers will hear. On the right is the “Speaker” button, which turns on the speaker, and in the centre is the number of new voicemails. All your voicemails (new as well as the old ones) are listed below along with the date. Tapping on any name starts the playback and tapping it again pauses it. There is a bar at the bottom that allows you to skip to any position in the playback, followed by a green “Call Back” button and a red “Delete” button. So you’ve got voicemail how you want to listen to it, when you want to listen to it, in any order you want to listen to it with Visual Voicemail.SMS on iPhone :Clicking on the green SMS icon on the upper left hand corner takes you to your Inbox. There is a new feature here too. Instead of having simple SMS texting, the iPhone has multiple sessions. So you can be carrying on conversations with people and every time you get a new message from them, you’ll be alerted to that and you can go check it out. This is similar to Gmail’s method of grouping together conversations. The standard Inbox has an Edit button at the top so you can select any SMS and orward it to others.New messages are denoted with the number in brackets in the centre and there is a “+” button for creating a new text message. The list of conversations is shown below with the name of the contact, date, and slight previews of each. A blue bullet next to any conversation denotes a new message received.Clicking on any conversation opens up a screen that shows all the messages sent to and forth in an organised manner and a full QWERTY keyboard at the bottom of the screen. The format of displaying the SMS is identical to Apple’s iChat mes senger on Mac-OS X. It looks exactly like an instant messaging window. The lit tle keyboard at the bottom is phenome nal. It does error prevention and cor rection, and Jobs claims that “it’s actu ally really fast to type on; it’s faster than all those plastic keyboards on all these smartphones.” Though it sounds like an overly objective claim, we’ll have to wait and see how much truth there is to that statement.The keyboard has all the alphanumeric keys along with caps lock, delete, return/enter, and space keys. There is another key that switches the alphanu meric keys to numeric keys and symbols and vice-versa. The keyboard can also be typed upon with two fingers simultaneously. A “Send” key sends the message and appends it to the conversation on the iPhone.Next up is photos, the last part of the phone application. It is slightly confusing why Apple is labelling this as part of the phone package: it really has no connection to the phone functionality. This could have been the odd one out, and they did not want to make a separate category just for it. The photo management application truly steals the show. Clicking on the “Photos” icon brings up the list of albums you have. “Photo Library” and “Camera Roll” are permanent fixtures here, and more albums can be added by the user. Clicking on the photo library brings up all the photos on he phone (apart from the ones taken from the onboard camera) aid displays the thumbnails of the whole lot on the screen. icrolling, as usual, is done with a flick of the finger. A numbered abel at the top shows the total number of photos in the library. A large translucent buttons runs across the bottom of the screen here which starts the slideshow.Clicking on any particular photo opens it up in full screen mode, and you can just flick through the other photos by swiping your finger in either direction. If you encounter an image wider than it is taller, you can simply turn the device, and the phone will automatically switch to landscape mode and the photo will be displayed widescreen. You can just take your fingers and pinch them and then move them further apart to zoom into the image. Bringing them closer together shrinks the image. It gives the impression that you are actually stretching the image apart.There are four buttons at the bottom of the screen (which appear only when you tap the display once, allowing unobstructed viewing of the photos using the full screen when they are not needed) that allow you to move to the next or previous photo or start a slideshow. There is also a button on the lower left that brings up three options. Use As Wallpaper, Email Photo, and Assign To Contact. On clicking the “Use As Wallpaper” button, a screen pops up that shows you a preview of what the photo will look like as the wallpaper. You can simple resize and move the picture here to suit your needs, and even swipe through to other pictures if you decide not to use that one as the wallpaper. After you’re done, simply clicking on ‘Set Wallpaper’ does the job and takes you back to the photo gallery. Clicking on “Email Photo” slightly shrinks the image to fit it in the message’s body and brings up the compose window behind it, complete with the address and subject fields and the QWERTY key board (with an animation). Tapping in the first few letters of any person’s name prompts the iPhone to offer suggestions from the address book, or you can use the little “+” icon towards the top left corner to bring up the contacts list and select contacts from there. You can, obviously, enter whatever you want in the body of the mail using the virtual keyboard and then press the “Send” button at the top left corner to dispatch the mail. Once that is done, the phone automatically returns to the library you were viewing.