Fresh from traveling with the iPhone, Philip Berne offers his thoughts on battery life, EDGE performance and the iPhone's durability. Was it a worthy travel companion?
Editor's note: Part 1 of this feature series can be found here.
Back from the mountains
I've just returned from my week in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I was vacationing with my iPho . . . er, my family. In all, the iPhone has been a mixed bag so far, which is not surprising to anyone following the coverage, but for this installment I hope to put this equivocation into some context. Specifically, how the iPhone made parts of my trip better, and frustrated me at other turns (literally).
On the plane
First, the plane rides with the iPhone were fantastic. The iPod, and especially video iPod features are a marvel, and if I ever doubted giving up a clickwheel, flicking through a long list of songs and stopping on a dime relieved all doubts. But I barely used the phone for music, as I had loaded it with a few movies and plenty of television shows. With backup copies ripped using Handbrake for the Mac, my movie files were all under 500MB, and television shows from iTunes were even smaller, so I had loaded up four movies and as many shows before I left. I had plenty of space left over, even with my music. Surprisingly, when you finish a movie, iTunes asks if you want to delete it to save space. I'm not sure how this space is used, since content can't be added without a sync anyway, but I got rid of videos as I watched them.
Battery life was truly awesome. Of course, I had Airplane Mode engaged, which turns off all radios, but I also had the brightness turned high, and I was constantly fiddling with the controls and shuttle options. On each flight, I watched two 1.5 hour long films and a couple of TV shows, and drained the battery by about two-thirds. I had plenty of life left to bring the radios back up, get directions to my hotel with over EDGE, and check my e-mail. In fact, with all the calls made during our day of rendezvous, I didn't end up charging the iPhone until I went to bed that night.
Day to day
The next day, I used the iPhone for heavy RSS reading over Wi-Fi, lots of directions and a few phone calls. Though I didn't take the brand-new, $600 phone hiking with me, I didn't charge it while I was gone, and it was dead before dinner was over. I felt like I had used it much less, so I'm assuming that the real battery hog here is not the screen, but the wireless connections. Still, in my weeklong trip, with plenty of EDGE for map-making and Wi-Fi for heavy browsing, it was the only day I felt the battery died when I still needed it.
Google Maps was even worse than I thought in my initial impressions, and though I could spend an entire installment detailing the bugs and frustrations, needless to say that very little on the app works well. It looks better than the version on my Treo, but it is completely unreliable, and a few times it tried to navigate me from Wyoming to California for a brewing company I knew was just in town.
Photographs
The camera takes images that range in quality from sharp and colorful, to noisy and blurry, depending on the quality of light and how still you hold it. It has no options, and only one touch button on the screen, so self-portraits are a pain, but not impossible. Landscape pictures looked good, and portraits were okay in bright sunlight, but at sunset, in or from a moving car, pictures got grainy and less usable. More disappointingly, pictures transferred to the iPhone from my Mac looked horrendous. Sharp images I had taken with my DSLR acquired lots of noise in the optimization process, and though I had fun zooming in and out of photos ("I'm crushing your head!"), often the zoomed results were embarrassingly bad.
EDGE coverage
Web browsing was very quick using Wi-Fi, and I was pleased with how robust Safari could be. My hotel required acceptance of terms and conditions before browsing sessions, and the iPhone had no problem with that, nor with logging onto our Web-based story server. Using EDGE was a different story, though my problems weren't Safari's fault, I don't think. Deep into Yellowstone National Park, though the iPhone showed full reception with EDGE on AT&T's network, I couldn't get a single page to load, not a pixel. Calls went through fine, but I suspect that EDGE coverage wasn't as good as regular GSM. Occasionally, powering the phone down and up got things moving, but more often than not I was simply stuck. This happened less in the town of Jackson, Wyoming, and not at all between Queens, New York and New Jersey, as we drove home at the end of the trip. As I mentioned previously, EDGE reception in New Jersey is good enough that YouTube streamed smoothly, but more remote areas will obviously be less reliable.
Scratched yet?
Finally, I'm happy to report that after a week of banging the phone around in my stuffed pockets, on planes and around town, it shows almost no signs of scratching. In the right light, at the right angle, a couple of scratches (literally, two) are visible near the earpiece, but nothing on the screen, and they were difficult to find twice. The chrome bumper around the screen is slightly scuffed, but it isn't very noticeable, since I hardly look at the bumper, anyway.
For the next week, I'll be using the iPhone in a business setting, putting the keyboard to good use and scouring the Web for new iPhone-compatible Web apps. Then, for my final segment, we'll give the iPhone a proper infoSync World review, with our final conclusions and buying advice for those of you who have yet to make up your mind about the device.
Read on in Part 3.
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