My results so far . . . .
These are my comments to this original post. Other viewers comments are in
RED. Mine are in
GREEN. Let me know if anyone has other questions.
ORIGINAL QUESTIONAIRE:
This is a list of things that most reviews miss to address yet very important to people. If you are making a review, please touch these in-depth areas. If anyone thinks of more, add to the list.
1. Supported video format. 640x480 is the official saying, but in reality, all current video iPod actually support any size as long as the product of the height and width does not exceed 640 x 480. (The fact is more complex than that. You have to divide the height by 16 and width by 16 and then multiply the two values, and the product needs to be less than 1200. For example, VGA size of 640x480 = 640/16 x 480/16 = 40 x 30 = 1200. If you have a horizontal resolution of 720, then your vertical resolution needs to be less than 426 in order to be supported by the current version of video iPod. In other words, video with aspect ratio other than 4:3 or larger horizontal resolution than 640 can still be played by all video iPod.) I want to know if this is true on iPhone as well. After all, it has a 3:2 aspect ratio screen, and all dSLR photos are taken at 3:2 as well.
2. Embedded video format supprted in Safari (QT, mov, avi)?
Only Quicktime .mov files are allowed. NO avi, mpeg or wmv support. There is no FlipforMac plug-in or any other non-Quicktime plug-in within the Safari browser (as far as I can tell). I have tested several plug-in types of sites that I know contain avis, mpegs, wmvs and so far QuickTime .movs are the only ones allowed.
3. Downloading and playback of mp3/image files from Safari? (i.e. download an image, then view it in photo, then email to someone.)
ANY downloading can not be done, period. Another note. If you click on a YouTube link it will go directly to the YouTube application in the iPhone if that particular video resides in the h.264 format. For example, I had an email a friend of mine had sent me with a YouTube link. When I clicked on it, it found that same video in the h.264 format and started playing it within the YouTube app in iPhone, hence bypassing the Flash FLV issue of going only to the YouTube site. This of course only works if the video ALSO resides in the h.264 format (as of now, only a small percentage of the YouTube videos have been converted to the h.264 format). By contrast, another friend if mine also sent me a YouTube video with the typical YouTube link. But this video has not been converted, so I got the "This video can not be played" message.
Cannot be done. Trailers from rottentomatoes.com cannot be viewed even with QT icons. Videos from Apple.com can be viewed however, but not embedded within the browser, but open up a new YouTube like interface.
4. Actual load time of EDGE in practical aspect. The NYT's measurement of "100 seconds per page" was pretty useless, since no one start reading a page only AFTER THE WHOLE PAGE IS LOADED. No, the most important thing is to load the page, FASTER, than one reads the page.
I live in a mountain town in NC, and after several tests, I was getting an average load time of 180-200 kbps, which was not bad at all. If you have an iPhone and want to test your speed, I suggest to go to a site such as http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/idt4.php to test your iPhone. It does a real good job of testing all kinds of speeds and has a full selection of test designed for mobile devices.
5. Voice quality, speaker phone volume, ringer volume.
Voice quality: Overall very good, but I have heard better on mobile devices. On a scale of 1-10, I would give it a 7.
Speaker phone volume: Excellent! This device puts out a volume much louder than you would expect to hear from such a small device. I was able to hear movies and songs without my headphones with no problem.
Ringer volume: I would give this a 6. I wish it was louder. Several times the phone rang and it was hard to distinguish it form ambient noise (which wasn't that loud).
6. Photo management of large amount of photos-- testing speed and stability when handling more than 1000 high resolution pictures. (I already got 1500 high resolution pics ready.) Also test if it will resize automatically, or retain original size. Also to test if I can zoom all the way into 100% level without losing any quality.
Phone resized all photo from my iPhoto onto iPhone therefore when you zoom in on iPhone you can only zoom in to about 2x the original screen size. There is no way around it. Viewing hundreds of them is fast enough, can't complain much.
7. Test using existing ATT sim card instead of the new iPhone SIM Card.
Not possible.
8. Insert iPhone SIM card in a different phone (unlocked).
Got rid of my only other mobile phone, so I couldn't test it.
9. Test typing compound words such as butterfly. Will the auto-speller mess me up? For example, if I try to type butter, the iPhone suggests butterfly after I finished typing the last letter of "butter," when I normally press the space key, will it automatically misunderstand me as accepting the suggested "butterfly" word?
To accept suggested word click "space" to reject simply click on the suggested word label.
Ditto. The keyboard (after 2 days with it) seems easier and easier to use. Hopefully with a software update you will be able to have a keyboard come up horizontally in ANY application (not only in Safari, which right now is the only app that allows you to do this). This way, the individual keys have space around them and typing becomes much more of a smoother process.
But overall, quite ompressed with the keyboard.
10. Test how many Safari windows can be opened, pop up blocker, accessing websites with excess spamming, continuous pop-up, etc.
A total of 8 TABS or Safari windows are allowed.
Pop up blocking is set in your Safari "Settings" widget along with "Search engine" preference (Google, Yahoo, etc.), Javascript (On or Off), Plug-ins (On or Off - which I assume is only for the QuickTime plug-in, don't know what other Plug-ins Safari has in the iPhone), Accepting of Cookies (Never, From visited or Always), Clear History, Clear Cookies and Clear Cache.
11. Test apple.com's QT video playback. Test specially secure sites such as bankofamerica.com or direct loan service.
Apple.com QT played fine. Digg.com login is also fine (ajax and jave script). Haven't tried banking sites.
I have tried Bank of America and it worked fine. It recognized my iPhone as a mobile device, therefore it sent me to the Bank of America mobile site and I was able to access my account (though much more limited that I am able to see on my desktop machine). But it did work just fine.
12. Test ftp.domainname.com format ftp access.
No ftp access is allowed. I get a Safari message ("Safari can't download this file.").
ADDITIONAL INFO:
(1) There is no Junk Mail filter. So if you rely on your Mail program (as I do with Apple's Mail, which the Junk filtering works for 99.9% of Junk mail I receive) then you will get all your mail (as well as Junk mail). Hopefully a software update will cure this.
(2) When composing a brand new email, there is no way to attach a photo after you have started writing. The only way to send photos is by going to the PHOTO widget, selecting a photo and then clicking on the "Email this Photo" button. But when composing an email from scratch, there is no way to start writing then decide to attach a photo. So, if you want to send a photo in an email, go to the PHOTO widget FIRST, set it up to send in an email, THEN start composing your message. Again, hopefully a Software Update will fix this.
(3) When setting up your iPhone for the first time, make sure you have cleared all the emails from your server first. Otherwise, you will get ALL your current emails from either the last week, 2 weeks or month (depending on how you have your current email app set up in your preferences). For example, I have it set up in Apple's Mail program to leave all my emails on the server for a week. So, when I set up my iPhone, I got all 136 emails from the last week. What I wanted to have happen is to have only my NEWEST emails appear. I ended up deleting most of them. A pain in the ass, but something i should have thought of before setting my phone.
(4) the weather widget doesn't seem to have all the world's cities listed. I'm not talking about some small town in Wales or anything. I wanted to include Buenos Aires. You know, the CAPITAL of Argentina (I have a lot of relatives living there - sister, cousins, grandfather, etc.). But all the weather widget could find was Buenos Aires, Punta Peru. I liked it better when AccuWeather.com was handling these things. Hopefully this will also get fixed. Not a big issue, but a pain nonetheless.
(5) Video resolution, quality is SUPERB!!! Can't get over how beautiful everything looks on this screen. YouTube videos on this thing looks 200% better than any YouTube video you will find on their site. Good choice on having them go with h.264 on this. You can really tell the difference.
More to come later.