Apple is clearly pitching the iPhone as “Your New Primary Music Device”, with the idea being that you can junk your iPod and just use the iPhone for music and calls alike. Trouble is, there’s a few issues preventing me from doing that. For starters, at 8GB, the capacity is a bit on the small side if you’ve got a sizeable digital collection - 16GB would have hit the spot better, although that’s down to limitations of flash memory.
More annoying is the headphone jack, which is recessed, and thus doesn’t fit a lot of third-party headphones, including my two Sennheiser pairs. As a result, you’re left either stuck with the white earbuds that come with the iPhone, or you have to spend £8 or so on a special adapter from the Apple Store. Swizz, to say the least.
However, as far as I can make out, the sound quality is good, with a range of EQ settings available through the main Settings menu on the iPhone. Getting music onto the device could be easier though, since on iTunes you can’t just drag and drop songs across as you would with an iPod: you have to set up a playlist to be synced, and drag them into that. I’m not sure why.
At least it’s easy to play music on the iPhone, navigating by artist, playlist and songs, as well as the ability to shuffle everything that’s on the handset. You can click a ‘More…’ button too to navigate by Composer or Genre, as well as access podcasts and audiobooks. There’s also the much-talked-about Cover Flow feature, which lets you flip through your albums by artwork. Honest opinion? I’ve never felt the need to use it, since jabbing at text buttons feels more natural.
One of the more dangerous features on the iPhone is its iTunes Wi-Fi Store application, which I’ve been using this week. It’s accessible from the iPhone homescreen, and takes you to a cut-down version of the iTunes Store. There’s a comprehensive selection to browse casually, including New Releases, What’s Hot, and Top Tens from a variety of genres. And there’s a Search function to find other stuff.
It’s simple to use, but why dangerous? Well, it does encourage impulse buys even more than the PC or Mac-based iTunes Store. I’ve already bought albums by Led Zeppelin and Britney Spears this week on a whim, while exploring the application. In both cases, they downloaded seamlessly over wi-fi, and then neatly synced with iTunes on my PC the next time I connected the iPhone up via its dock. I can see myself spending way too much money this way.
Overall, then, iPhone performs fairly well as a pure music device, although the headphones issue is near-unforgiveable - why include a standard jack if you’re then going to rule out many standard headphones? I’d also like to see the iPhone’s music features bolstered in the coming months - for example, with internet radio, which would seem fairly easy to implement.
Previous parts
Part 3: The camera and photos
Part 2: Email and the virtual keyboard
Part 1: First impressions
dios!!!
ke reporte del asco
no le entendi nada
haha
ke mierda
adios!!!