iPhone Road Test: Day 5

A look at Safari and the iPod app

Ian Williams, vnunet.com 22 Nov 2007

Today is the final day of our week-long road test of Apple's iPhone and I'll taking a closer look at two of the most highlighted applications: the iPod music player and the Safari web browser.

I already highlighted my dislike of iTunes on day two of the road test, so I won't harp on about it now, except to say that, with the exception of iTunes, the iPod functionality is great.

The sound quality is good and navigating is easy. Tilting the phone on its side opens Cover Flow, which shows each album cover allowing users to flick through their music.

This feature looks very impressive but, as I seldom listen to individual albums at a time, it's not particularly useful to me.

As you would expect you can import playlists from iTunes or create an 'on-the-go' playlist from the music currently on the iPhone.

Alternatively you can sort by song, artist, album, genre or composer, as well as separate out videos, audio books and podcasts.

The iPod controls are available at any time by double clicking the home button, even from the locked screen, meaning that you don't have to navigate away from what you're doing to the iPod app just to change tracks.

Now on to the Safari web browser. I don't use a Mac, so I can't compare this to the full blown Safari browser, but I can say that Apple's claims are somewhat flawed.

Apple states in one of its iPhone ads that "this isn't a watered down version of the internet, or the mobile version of the internet, or the sort of 'looks like the internet internet'. It's just the internet on your phone."

This simply isn't true as the browser has several limitations that may cause some serious issues for users depending on your surfing habits.

The most glaring shortfall is that it doesn't support Flash, Java or custom plug-ins, so if you regularly visit sites that use any of these then prepare to be disappointed.
Also it occasionally has problems with frames and the layout of certain web pages, including vnunet.com's. It won't load video clips (not even embedded YouTube clips), but will load PDFs and other documents.

It's not all bad; if you can live without Flash and Java this is certainly one of the most painless mobile browsing experiences around.

The large, high resolution screen combined with the interface lends itself to browsing, particularly in landscape mode.

There is also an intelligent zoom feature. If you double tap the screen the page zooms into the column width of where you tapped. Alternatively you can zoom in and out using the 'pinch' controls.

A few popular sites like Facebook have created versions of their sites specifically for the iPhone, highlighting the fact that this isn't really the 'full internet' and is easier to use with sites specifically optimised for the interface.