On the overall, whether the iPhone’s of any good to a person depends on what’s more important in that device to him. As a mobile phone, the iPhone really isn’t very good. Messaging is difficult without an alphanumeric keypad or a T9 dictionary, and out of the box is crippled without landscape orientation or message forwarding.
As a productivity device for you to carry documents and files around, it’s also poor. Short of jailbreaking the device and installing third party software like DiskAid, the iPhone out of the box doesn’t allow you to directly access its built-in storage – which basically severely limits the device and its massive space to just music and video content. If document viewing and business productivity is important and forking out money for third party software is an effrontery to you, stay away from this phone too.
What does work is when the iPhone is used as a mobile Internet and entertainment device. Not to a netbook’s ability of course. But viewing emails on the go work well, as does news and maps reading, and Youtubing. The music playback from other reviews is adequate and isn’t nearly as good as say Nokia’s line of music phones, but I don’t intend for my iPhone to be a MP3 device – not when the Cowon D2 is a far superior player. And believe it or not: I got better audio through earphones on even the cheapo MSI Wind netbook than the iPhone – and it has a graphic equalizer to boot (missing on the iPhone).
The iPhone in my take isn’t value for money. For what it brings to the table, you get beat back by SGD938 for the 8 GB model, and you’ll need to fork out more for critical software that you normally get built-in in other phones.
So who then is this device for? Well, The Apple Faithful have never needed reasons to throw more money on overpriced toys that come out from their Gods at Cupertino, California. For the rest of us, I think it all comes down to whether you have (a lot of) money to burn, and whether portable Internet and entertainment is more important than phone functionality. If it’s ‘yes’ to both, then well this is one device you’d enjoy.
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