I’ve had my iPhone in hand for about a little less than a day now and I am fairly quite impressed at the device’s awesome features but my opinion of Apple’s first phone isn’t all positive and no it’s not about the evident lack of core features that make up the most basic of phones. Here is part 1 of my iPhone review.

Music
Navigating to your home screen and touching the iPod button can access music on the iPhone. If you are accustomed to the iPod’s simplistic and easily navigated interface then you will be blown away by the iPhone’s version of music navigation due to the graphical overhaul and a sense of clutter. It took some getting used to and it seems Apple wanted to make media playback a pivotal part of the iPhone experience all the way down to the hardware. First off the iPhone can still be used while being synced and sometimes it cannot, I do not know as to why but I think me being able to use it while my content is being synced over was a glitch. While charging, the iPhone can be used, this shouldn’t come as a surprise but what will is the careful planning Apple took to music playback. Music can be blasted through either the included earphones (if previous experience has served me right I’ll need to replace them 3-4 months from now due to something) or the bottom speaker. I find it odd that Apple would actually choose the speaker for playing music because while making a call through the speakerphone, the volume when turned up to the maximum is still very quiet and while playing a video it is also extremely quiet. However the speaker is still a welcomed feature to the iPhone although it needs significant improvement before I reconsider making calls with it enabled.

A neat function of the iPhone’s dock is the ability to direct your music where you want. Along the bottom of the dock are small holes to allow your music to be heard but the dock itself is slightly raised so the sound will be aimed downward then bounces back up. I found this increased the overall loudness by just a bit versus aiming the iPhone wherever while playing music through the speaker. The dock also includes and audio out port that you can connect your home stereo to or just your earphones. When the iPhone is docked and the earphones are attached to the dock music volume is extremely loud for some reason even when the volume is down and when receiving a call I was not able to hear the caller through the earphones but they could hear me.

If you use speakerphone everything is much better including the call’s overall volume. In short the iPhone’s included dock would be best left for charging, syncing, music playback and conversations using the speakerphone. Receiving calls fades back the music very suddenly and prompts you to accept or deny the call; I would hope Apple extends the fade back by two seconds. But when done with your call you are taken back to the song that was playing and starts where you left off.

Final Impressions
Overall I liked Apple’s use of Cover Flow and the extensive work gone into making libraries manageable by creating multiple sorting options. This however has created a sense of clutter because all of these options are being displayed on a small 3.5-inch screen. You might think Apple should’ve gone with the system already used by iPods to manage and access music but that would be a total lack of care for something such as the iPhone, Apple needed a new way to manage music and I think their current implementation is good but it needs some getting used to because a lot of the screen is taken up.

Video
Video navigation isn’t as robust as finding music but it still’s manageable. First off any playlists you may have created to limit the amount of videos that are synced over will be totally forgotten.  You’re only means of finding and organizing video content is under the Videos Tabs, under more then Podcasts, and under more then albums. Coverflow does not work for video content and it is a shame but I can see why Apple wouldn’t allow it, you’d likely be scrolling through a dozen videos at most. However the videos tab does categorize content based on whether or not it is a Podcast, Movie or TV Show. Playing back videos is snappy and a tad faster than a Hard Drive based iPod. You’ll have to turn your iPhone sideways as it won’t play anything in portrait mode, it is landscape only. Also it will only work one way, you can’t turn the iPhone 180 degrees and expect the accelerometer to flip it accordingly. I found watching video a very comfortable experience and was worried my pre iPod formatted content would be distorted. This turned out to be the exact opposite as the entire screen was mostly filled except for the top and bottom (widescreen content) or the sides had a bit of space (4:3 content). Tapping the screen twice can easily solve this and your video will zoom in to fill whatever space it hasn’t already. The iPhone’s video controls took some getting used to especially changing the volume, I would find my thumb or index finger completely over the slider yet it would not move. As expected controls are simple consisting of a medium sized box containing volume control, play/pause, fast forward and rewind while the top allows you to return to the previous menu, displays how far long you’re into the video, a slider allowing you to jump anywhere and the option to zoom in or out of. Also displayed is the standard top bar showing WiFi or EDGE status, time, battery status and all that good stuff. You can exit out of the onscreen controls by tapping the screen once or un-pausing the current video.

The only downside to using video with the iPhone is the constriction of options in iTunes. You had a much greater selection for filtering video content when it came to the iPod and I would think Apple would refine this even more to adapt to the limited storage space but that sadly is not true. Your options consist of syncing watched/unwatched/how many episodes of selected TV Shows and syncing over selected movies watched or not. Apple really needs to get on the ball but the lack of options seems to me that Apple would have rather you buy songs than videos as they make more money off of 4 GB worth of songs versus 4GB of movies.

Podcasts whether they be music or video enjoy a bit more options allowing to choose just which ‘casts you want on, whether or not they should be recent or old episodes and how many episodes.

Other Items

When watching a video and receiving a call it’s not the same thing as with listening to music while receiving a call, when you are finished you’ll be returned to the video section and not back to the movie but your spot will be saved. You can use the speaker for audio output but the volume is terribly low and should only be used in the quietest of places. In addition you can use the dock to watch video when hooked up to a stereo or earphones and yes the sound is amplified quite a bit. The ringer volume button can be used to control music and video volume as well.

Final Word
While Apple would like to make you think that the iPod features of the iPhone are a huge part of the device I would like to see Apple take as much care as did with the iPod when it came to video management. Options for sorting content are primitive at best and the extreme lack of storage is a huge fault, Apple should’ve done a 8GB and a 16GB model to satisfy those of us with massive video libraries. The iPhone does have awesome controls nonetheless and adapts easily to 4:3 content and iPod formatted iPod, which was a huge factor to determine the success of the video portion of the iPhone. While Apple has the potential to dazzle us they missed out by not increasing storage and better sorting options.

Another thing that I’d like to note, although over the air downloads would’ve been awesome Apple would limit it to music only due to the somewhat slow speed of the EDGE network and the small storage space.

My verdict, good controls, amazing screen but sorting options are better for music than video.

This concludes part 1 of my review; tomorrow part 2 will be up and will focus on the phone part of the iPhone.