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Apple iPhone
Price: £269 inc VAT for 8GB, £329 for 16GB. Requires 18-month contract with O2 from £35 per month

Features
Performance
Ease of use
Value for money
Overall

Reviewed By: Andy Shaw

This review updated: 19/01/2008
Featured in magazine:
Issue 175
Manufacturer Contacts:
Supplier: Apple
Tel: 0845 600 1683
Web Address: www.apple.com/uk


Best Price:
Few gadgets generate the kind of fuss witnessed recently with the launch of Apple's iPhone. It takes a certain breed of product to see obsessive fans queueing overnight to be one of the first in line to get their hands on the device. The media hype surrounding Apple's entry into the mobile phone market has been nothing short of phenomenal. But now that it's actually available to UK consumers and the smoke has cleared, is it worth all the fuss?

Features:
The short answer is yes: the iPhone is a revolutionary product. It's clear from the moment you switch it on that Apple's designers have deconstructed the concept of what a media-rich, internet-connected mobile phone should be and rebuilt it from scratch. It hasn't got every feature you could desire in this incarnation – a few key omissions include no access to the 3G network for fastest internet access, no BlackBerry-style push email so you have to log in and check your mail to see if you've got something new, and a weedy 2-megapixel camera without a flash or video option. But it has got Wi-Fi, it's a great phone and it's an impressive 8GB iPod. It will play video and photo slideshows, access Google Maps and YouTube, and surf websites that you would otherwise have hadto use a computer to access. All from a truly brilliant touch-screen interface.

Performance:
It suffers from the usual iPod trait of not being particularly handy at playing files that haven't been encoded in Apple-friendly formats, so forget about your WMV videos or your WMA music if you're a PC user. Synchronisation is done in iTunes, so if the program won't play a track, you're not going to see it on your iPhone, unless it's streaming direct from the web. The installed Safari browser does a fine job of rendering websites – you get the same view you'd get on a computer – just drag two fingers across the screen to zoom in or out. What it lacks in support for file formats, it makes up for in just about everything else. 3G users will feel the pain of moving back to 2.5G, but if they find a Wi-Fi hotspot for their internet tasks, all will be forgiven.

Ease of Use:
You might think that your current mobile phone isn't particularly difficult to use, but how often do you delve into its extra features? The iPhone brings all its features to the fore, with an accessible, over-arching icon screen that provides one- or two-touch access to all its features. It even improves on some mobile basics. Your voicemail is listed by caller and you can skip to a particular part of an individual voicemail message with a flick of the finger. SMS text messages look like instant messenger conversations. Everything else is just as simple, with the software creating on-screen buttons exactly when and where they're needed. Quite honestly, if we could have given this seven stars for ease of use, we would.

Value for money:
Pricing is quite simple – you pay £269 outright for the device. You then have a choice of three contracts ranging from £35 to £55 per month. The only difference between them is the amount of free call time and texts included per month, which start at 200 minutes and 200 texts on the £35 contract. All three contracts offer unlimited web access and use of the phone's online services, though a reasonable use policy applies. In the UK we're used to getting even the latest phones for free with a contract but O2's monopoly on selling the device has clearly put paid to this. However, if you want the slickest multimedia phone around, you're simply going to have to cough up.

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