Oh iPhone you're merely good, but you could have been great... (Apple iPhone 3G 16 GB)

Member Name: dancingmonkey

Product:	Apple iPhone 3G 16 GB
Date:	09/02/09 (85 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Super-sexy, small, a vast array of innovative features

Disadvantages: No MMS capability, poor camera, low battery life

I do love my iPhone. It's sexy, sleek and makes you feel very cool when you use it. The majority of the features here are outstanding and innovative: the App Store allows you to download whatever games, applications or additional features you want (and at last count there were over 15,000 to choose from - with a large percentage of them completely free!); it's a proper, all singing, all dancing iPod which has more than enough memory to cope with having all your favourite albums with you; Google maps is like a portable sat-nav; you can sync your contacts and calendar entries back to your PC or Mac over the air; purchase songs directly from iTunes; surf the real live Internet; retrieve your emails... Oh, and even make telephone calls if the mood takes you! In short, it's the best phone I've ever had.

So, what's the catch? Well, there are a few glaring omissions which you should be aware of before deciding to spend a whole wedge of cash on the world's sexiest gadget. Firstly, you can't send picture messages (at least, you can't on the UK handset). There's an application you can download from App Store which fixes this quite well, but they will charge you via PayPal for each message you send, which isn't exactly ideal when you pay O2 already. You can't forward text messages to your friends either - so that funny joke you just got has to stay in your head, if you don't want to type it out all over again. The camera doesn't have a flash and is pretty poor in anything other than glaringly bright sunshine. Battery life can be quite low if you use a lot of the features (I charge mine every day - but then I do use the iPod to and from work, phone, text and email through out the day, surf the Net at lunch time and play on Monopoly when ever I'm bored). As for video recording? What video recording?!

These minor gripes aside, it really is a phone which is groundbreaking in a lot of ways by bringing a whole host of features to a mobile handset that simply aren't available elsewhere in such a compact and attractive package. If you can forgive Apple for missing out some basic features, and can wait on them to release fixes in their own good time, then treat yourself. Your friends will be green with envy...

Summary: Good, but a few basic features missing stop it being excellent

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Ease of use:
Sound quality:
Variety of features: