E-mail on iPhone

 The iPhone hooks up to almost any IMAP or POP3 mail service. IMAP, of course, is best, because you can keep all your folders and mail on the server and access it from anywhere. Yahoo! Mail is IMAP, Microsoft Exchange has an IMAP option, and .Mac Mail is IMAP as well. Gmail, AOL Mail, and most ISPs’ mail are POP3. Yahoo! Mail is the biggest mail service in the world, they have over a quarter of a billion users—and they are going to provide free “push” IMAP email to all iPhone customers. This isn’t just IMAP email, it is push IMAP email, so when you get a message, it will push it right out to the phone for you, like with a Blackberry.The e-mail Inbox has a “Mailboxes” button at the upper left cor­ner which takes you to your list of mailboxes such as Outbox, Drafts, and your custom folders. There is a refresh button at the lower left that fetches new mail from the server, and a compose button at the lower right to write a new mail message. The centre of the screen lists all the e mails you’ve received. The list is identical to the SMS inbox right down to the blue bullet that marks unread messages. The bar at the top, as usual, reflects the number of unread email in brackets. E-mails with attachments have the familiar paperclip icon beside them. You can click on any message to open it in full screen view, which is capable of displaying inline photos and rich text, exactly as it would on a computer. Pretty much everything is present here; you can view other e-mails using the arrow keys, see the sender, date, and other details, reply to it or forward it, move it to some other folder, refresh it basically, anything that you would want to do!You can zoom in on any e-mail by the pinch-and-zoom method or simply double-tapping on it. The iPhone also parses out and recognises the phone numbers in e-mails, so you can simply tap on any phone number in an e-mail to call it. When you’re viewing the Inbox, there are also two buttons at the upper right corner that let you toggle between the default full screen view and a split screen view. If you decide to go with the latter, the screen is divided into two parts (which are resizable) with the list of messages on the top half and the contents of the selected e-mail at the bottom. ‘Phis is very helpful if you want to browse through your messages really fast and find a message you were looking for. So it’s real e-mail, just like you’re used to on your computer, right here on your phoneBreakthrough Internet Communicator on iPhoneThis was the feature that was met with a pretty lukewarm response when Jobs announced it at Macworld, but when he was through with the demo, it was met with an enthusiastic cheer of approval. The iPhone features rich HTML e-mail and works with any IMAP or POP3 service. It has the Safari Web browser (the default browser on Mac OS X), which Apple claims is the first fully-usable HTML browser on a phone. The iPhone also uses Google Maps to bring the user maps, satellite images, directions and traf­fic. It also has widgets with the default two being weather and stocks. More can be downloaded. And it communicates with the Internet over EDGE and Wi-Fi, and the iPhone automatically detects Wi-Fi and switches seamlessly to it; you don’t have to man­age the network .it just does the right thing.When you launch the browser, you are faced with a simple screen with very few buttons. There is a button for adding book- marks, another one that stops a Web page from loading and changes to the reload button when the loading is complete, back and forward buttons, and a bookmarks button to browse through your bookmarks. The address bar itself functions as the status bar while a page is loading.  The default page is, of course, Apple’s official site. The magic starts when you open a Web page. It is not a WAP version of the page, or any version that is compromised in any manner—it is the whole page as you would see it on a computer screen. Turn the phone on its axis and it switches to landscape mode, which makes for a better Web browsing experience on most sites.Scrolling across a Web page is done with the same flick action used throughout the interface. Since the phone loads the whole Web site onto a tiny 3.5 inch screen, the text on most sites becomes very small and illegible. So you can get in with your fingers and pinch it, but there is an optimisation here— you can simply double tap on anything and it automatically fills up the screen with it. You can simply zoom in and scroll around and    zoom    in even more. You can practically view any Web site any way it suits you. To click on any link, you simply have to tap it once.You can look at multiple pages as well. There is a button at the lower right hand corner; when you push it, it shrinks down the page that is currently open and you can tap on a button at the lower left-hand corner to add a new page. You can then go to any other page you want on this page. Hit that button again and you are taken back to the screen where you can select the Web page you want or add a new one. There is a red close button on the top of every page, you simply tap on it to close it. There is no limit to the number of pages you can simultaneously browse. And that con­cludes Safari, a full-featured, fast Web browser on a mobile device. Jobs cannot refrain from boasting about the features from time to time: “If you’ve ever used what’s called a ‘Web browser’ on a mobile phone, you’ll know how incredible this is—I hope you never really know, because it’s bad out there today and this is a revolution of the first order to really bring the real internet to your phone!”4.2.5 WidgetsThere are these tiny widgets bundled with the iPhone for stock information and weather forecasts. Nothing extraordinary here. The weather widget is beautiful, with icons to represent various weather conditions.’ It gives you a lot of options such as how man}’ days of the week the widget should display, whether it should include the high and lows or not, and whether it should show the tem perature in Fahrenheit or Celsius. The stocks widget lets you track the stock market con dition of as many companies as you want (Apple is on the default set, of course and Microsoft is conspicuously absent!) and it is capable of showing a lot of data in units or percentages, uses different colours to denote the various conditions, shows graphs over a period of as many months as you define. All things considered, it is a handy addition to the list of features—certainly not something you cannot live without, but you’ll be grateful they’re there.Google MapsThis is the last major feature in the iPhone and it does not disappoint. Eric Schmidt,Google CEO, joined Apple’s board  a few months ago and this is the first product to’ come out of the relationship between Apple and Google. As soon as you tap the Maps icon, it takes you to a map of the world (setby default to show you North America).There is a Google search field on the top in which you can enter the name of whichever place you want to go to. If you enter “San Francisco”, for example, it will show you the map of California and will drop a red pin onto the map to point out the exact location of San Francisco. Now you can search for any place in San Francisco you want to see, for example “Starbucks”, and it pinpoints (literally!) all the Starbucks outlets located in San Francisco.Now you can click on the “List” tab at the bottom of the screen and it will list the details of all the Starbucks it pointed out. You can click on the one you want to know about and it will show you only that particular Starbucks outlet on the map along with a button for more information about it. In the information panel, if there is a phone num­ber, you can directly place a call to it. Of course, you can zoom into the map with whichever method you prefer and can also view the satellite imagery of any place in the world. That’s about it; it is quite possibly the best implementation of Google Maps on a handheld device.