iPhone passes first test,experts give thumbs-up

Apple’s iPhone is a “beautiful and breakthrough” mobile device that lives up to the hype. That’s the word from reviewers for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today, who praised the software and design of Apple’s melded mobile phone and iPod media player.

The iPhone’s strengths outweigh its spotty network service and price of as much as $600, they said. “Despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer,” Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, said in a review on Tuesday. “Its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.”

The accolades will help chief executive officer Steve Jobs meet his goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008, giving the company 1% of the mobile-phone market. He expects the iPhone to become Apple’s third major business, along with the Macintosh computer and iPod, whose combined sales more than tripled in five years to almost $20 billion in 2006. “If the device lives up to the hype, then that will be a pretty big positive, because the hype has been quite large,” said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon. Apple may sell as many as 200,000 iPhones in the first two days after its release on June 29, he said.
Mossberg, USA Today’s Edward Baig and David Pogue, a columnist for the New York Times, all said one of the iPhone’s main drawbacks is its exclusive tie to AT&T, which delivers inconsistent coverage. AT&T’s network ranked either last or second-to-last in 19 out of 20 major cities in providing a signal, Pogue said, citing a Consumer Reports survey. The iPhone relies on AT&T’s Edge service, which lags behind AT&T’s fastest so-called third-generation, or 3G, data networks. While the Edge network failed to match the broadband data speeds home users may be accustomed to, Baig said the iPhone is still a “glitzy wunderkind worth lusting for.”

“Apple has delivered a prodigy — a slender fashion phone, a slick iPod and an Internet experience unlike any before it on a mobile handset,” Baig wrote on Tuesday. Pogue concurred, though he took Apple to task for failing to include chat software. He also said many users would prefer tapping out messages on Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, rather than on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard. “Even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years,” Pogue wrote. “It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles.”

Meanwhile, Vodafone is in talks with Apple to launch iPhone in Europe, and talks partly hinge on volume guarantees and subsidies, a Dutch magazine reported. Apple demanded a guaranteed sales volume for the iPhone, which the British mobile operator did not want to give, Dutch magazine Bright said on its website late on Tuesday. The magazine said Vodafone was pushing for more scope to subsidise the phone and did not want Apple to have control of the sale price.