Apple iPhone Review Roundup

Let’s not reinvent the scrollwheel gents. Here are links to reviews of the iPhone around the Internet:

Walt Mossberg’s Review

But the iPhone has a major drawback: the cellphone network it uses. It only works with AT&T (formerly Cingular), won’t come in models that use Verizon or Sprint and can’t use the digital cards (called SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile’s network. So, the phone can be a poor choice unless you are in areas where AT&T’s coverage is good. It does work overseas, but only via an AT&T roaming plan.

David Pogue

The Web browser, though, is the real dazzler. This isn’t some stripped-down, claustrophobic My First Cellphone Browser; you get full Web layouts, fonts and all, shrunk to fit the screen. You scroll with a fingertip — much faster than scroll bars. You can double-tap to enlarge a block of text for reading, or rotate the screen 90 degrees, which rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view.

MSNBC

The specially formatted YouTube videos work great on Wi-Fi, but can display in a lower quality when you’re not at a hotspot and are using AT&T’s EDGE network. At launch, only a small percentage of the millions of video will have been reformatted to work with the phone. (Fortunately for me, this included a couple of swell Amy Winehouse videos.) The fact is that YouTube without the long tail of hundreds of thousands of videos is barely worth the effort. But Google and Apple promise that by fall the entire collection will be available for iPhone streaming, and that users will be able to fill up every idle moment with unproductive glory.

USA Today

Finger-tapping takes getting used to. Best advice: Start typing with one finger before graduating to two thumbs. You also have to learn to trust the device; an intelligent virtual keyboard auto-corrects mistakes on the fly and anticipates what you will type next to try to prevent you from making a mistake.

Though you’re frequently touching the display, I didn’t notice fingerprints when iPhone is on.

New York Post

But the reality is that the iPhone has a very small screen compared to even the tiniest laptop. You can’t read much of an article on a Web page without panning back and forth across. This is true of word-processing, too; at a size comfortable enough to read, you can’t see either the full length or width of a document.

Where is the SIM slot located?