Official iPhone reviews emerge - highlights

The New York Times, The Wallstreet Journal, USA Today and NewsWeek have posted their reviews of the iPhone. While most of the features are already revealed on Apple's web site, David Pogue, Walt Mossberg, Edward C. Baig and Steven Levy show us how it really feels to use this device.

Email, Web Browser are "fantastic" - Pogue

Pogue describes the Email client which is based on Mac OS X Mail application as "fantastic" as it can show-up fully formated mails and preview attachements such as Office and PDF documents in addition to JPEG image files.

The web browser is described just as advertised in Apple's iPhone ad campaign. He says "this isn’t some stripped-down, claustrophobic My First Cellphone Browser" and provides details on how easy it is to surf with the device.

"You’ll probably wind up recharging about every other day" - Pogue

Pogue tested the device's battery-life for video and audio playback and said it was good but not as good as advertised. He obtained 5 hours of video and 23 hours of audio. Compared to the "7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio" figures provided by Apple.

He didn't turn off Wifi as suggested by Apple to get optimal battery-life though. So we can't say Apple is lying on this.

"The virtual-keyboard issue is a non issue" - Mossberg

In his column and video review for the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg squashes one of the biggest concerns regarding the virtual keyboard of the iPhone.

He says that during the three first days he wanted to through the iPhone out of the window, but on the fifth day, he got used to it and now types faster than he did on his Palm Treo after years of use.

"You can hold a conference call with up to five people" - Baig

Baig finds the main feature which is making a call pretty simple. The numeric pad is said to be large enough to prevent you from calling the wrong number.

Pretty cool uh? Baig highlights that the maximum number of users participating in a conf call is 5.

"Certainly all those people lining up to buy iPhones will find their investment worthwhile" - Levy

As the two other reviewers, Levy finnishes his review with an overall positive opinion on the device, he definitely believes it's worth the $499 or $599 price tag, respectively for the 4GB or 8GB models.

Notice Levy has brought us one of the most detailed reviews out there and if didn't highlight many parts of it it's because I believe it's worth reading it all.

The biggest issue: it's an AT&T only device - Pogue, Mossberg, Baig, Levy

Walt Mossberg says one only negative point about the iPhone: It is available only with AT&T and can be unusable on certain places in the U.S.A. where AT&T hasn't got a great network coverage.

All of the four reviewers say AT&T's EDGE network for Internet access is really slow but add that when the iPhone can reach a Wifi network, it flies.

Is Microsoft Exchange support the Pro feature we were hinted at?

A few days before the World Wide Developers Conference, earlier this month, MacScoop published a report with some details about the iPhone. In this report, we mentoined sources claiming that a business oriented feature would arrive on the iPhone but we weren't told which one it was.

Now both Mossberg and Baig claim the iPhone's got Microsoft Exchange support, though it might require some special settings on the server side.

In addition to that, Apple recently revealed in a 24 minute commercial video of the iPhone made available on its web site, that the iPhone was capable of previewing Office docs.

It appears that one of the two or both of these features were at the origin of these claims. We couldn't obtain additional information from our sources on that but we were told there aren't any further feature announcements to expect until Friday which sounds obvious now these two official reviews are published.

These same sources, expect Apple to add several features to the iPhone after its release and this isn't really a secret either as Apple has said it during last quarter's financial conference.