Apple iPhone San Francisco CA

Among those who queued up on June 29 to buy an iPhone were several of our editors; we have been putting it to the test ever since.

Our verdict: There's plenty to love, and plenty to lament. The iPhone offers a solid design and a beautiful, touch-sensitive 480-by-320-pixel screen you can control with multiple taps or pinches of your fingers. Its browser, while not as versatile as the one on your notebook, is impressive. And of course, it works fine as a cell phone.

But activation requires signing up for a two-year service plan, which may outlast the sealed-in battery. The iPhone doesn't work with AT&T's fastest (HSDPA) data network, and it doesn't work with any third-party apps except Web-based ones--and even those may not run properly, since the iPhone doesn't support several Web formats like Flash.

Overall, the iPhone ranked fifth in our recent PDA phones chart; despite a Superior design score, its specs score and high price weighed it down. Unlike the T-Mobile Wing and Dash, for example, the iPhone lacks productivity apps for editing documents.

You can sign up for phone service yourself via Apple's iTunes 7.3. In the first days after its launch, we heard many reports of problems with activation; our staffers didn't experience such glitches, however.

Your finger does almost all the navigation, because the iPhone has only four hardware buttons. Once you power it up, sliding your finger across the screen unlocks the phone. Pinching, a two-finger movement, zooms the part of the screen framed by the pinch. Flick or drag your finger to scroll through menus or Web pages. The screen will autorotate content between landscape and portrait mode, depending on which application you're using.

For any feature that requires text input, the iPhone displays an on-screen keyboard that you can toggle between QWERTY text keys and numbers/symbols. It's still no match for the hardware keyboard you get on a BlackBerry or Treo, but it certainly beats any standard cell phone keypad.

As a phone, the iPhone works well. Touch-screen dialing is easy enough, although getting to a numeric keypad requires two taps of the phone icon (the first tap just brings up your contacts). We found this two-step process annoying when attempting to dial a number directly--and we wouldn't try to do that while driving. The iPhone lacks voice dialing, and we're not convinced we could successfully dial blind, as we can on a hardware keypad.

Most calls sounded good, albeit with an occasional hiss that was audible to the caller but not to the person on the other end. The speakerphone was faint.The device can get warm with constant use, and you'll need to wipe smudges from the glass screen frequently with the included cloth. The screen is smart enough to darken and deactivate some controls while you're on a call, so you don't accidentally press something with your cheek. We also loved the visual voice-mail feature, as it lets you choose which voice messages (identified by number or address-book name) to listen to first. However, we wish that the phone also had multimedia messaging and instant messaging capabilities (it allows text messaging, of course).

The iPhone's rechargeable lithium ion battery lasted the maximum 10 hours in our talk-time tests, running 2 hours longer than Apple's own stated call time. The phone lasted only 4 hours, 21 minutes, however, when we viewed a 320-by-128-pixel version of Serenity at a 647-kbps bit rate--almost 2.5 hours less than Apple's stated video playback time. You can't remove the battery, so you'll have to ship the unit back to Apple if it needs to be replaced.

Apple says that the battery is designed to keep up to 80 percent of its charge after 400 full charge cycles, and that the company will replace the battery if the capacity falls below 50 percent during the one-year warranty period. To get the battery replaced out of warranty, you will have to send it to Apple and pay $86 (including shipping). You should be prepared to relinquish your phone for three days. A $69 extended warranty covers the battery and the rest of the iPhone's hardware for a second year.