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It's ironic, but I spent the majority of my early time with the iPhone exploring the built-in applications and thus it was quite a while before I first tested it as a phone. Cellular phone technology seems ancient and not nearly as exciting as a revolutionary gesture-based touch-screen interface.

(I still believe the phone aspects of iPhone are not its reason for being -- they are a Trojan Horse Steve Jobs has planted in order to get people to buy the thing. People know and understand phones; they don't yet realize the value of a handheld "Internet device." But once they start using the Internet anywhere, they'll be hooked and their addiction will make "Crackberries" seem as tame as chocolate chip cookies.)

All that said, the iPhone does need to work as a phone and it had better be a damn good one, considering the price. I am pleased to report that the iPhone is a fantastic phone -- by far the best I've seen. In many ways the phone features are almost forgotten because they are so well integrated and transparent. The thing just works. You don't need to know anything.

How many times have you tried to be helpful and answer someone else's phone for them and been flumoxed by the many buttons? I've hung up on people several times on my mom's phone. There's that sense of panic as the phone rings and you need to answer it quickly and it's easy to press the wrong button.

No such worries on the iPhone. I actually tested several people who'd never even seen an iPhone with a cold call to see their reaction. I would hand them the ringing phone to see what they would do. When the iPhone's been asleep, it is locked. But the normal "Slide to Unlock" screen now shows the incoming caller's picture (if available) and the slider reads "Slide to Answer." Most fumbled for a few seconds, not sure exactly what the whole slider thing meant -- and most were hesitant to touch the screen at first.

But you know what? Every person I tried this with successfully answered the phone before the call went to voice mail! After a fumble or two they slid the thumb to the right and the phone unlocked and the caller was talking. Incredibly easy.

After the call it was difficult to get the iPhone back as they wanted to play with it!

Calling just works. It's integrated throughout the device. I was amazed when I first started web browsing and I went to one of my own websites as a test. This particular site featured a voice mail number of mine and I noticed it was colored blue and underlined. Since I decided the site I knew I hadn't coded it that way, which set off some alarms. So I touched the number. iPhone promptly asked me if I wanted to call that number!

I couldn't believe it. It was smart enough to identify a phone number on a web page based on the format, and it allowed me to call it via a touch. So simple, so logical, yet I'm sure that's a first.

iPhone incorporates such things throughout. Contacts can be dialed with a touch, of course, but so can Google Map searches, which is remarkably convenient.

Contact management, which is a nightmare on most phones, is what sells the iPhone. You can fully manage your contacts on the phone if you wish, or do it on your main computer and sync. Changes in either place are synced so you always have current data on both machines. I've spent decades fumbling with contact details. I have mailing addresses in one program I use for mail merges for my Christmas newsletter, my emails in another program, my iChat IDs are on my laptop, and phone numbers are in a simple text file on my other laptop. Why? I have no idea. It's just the way it developed over the years and I never had the incentive to move everything to Address Book until now. Now I am motivated. Having everything in the palm of my hand is awesome. If you've got a contact's address on the iPhone you can just click on it to open Google Maps to that location.

I discovered that having photos of contacts is not only cool, but useful. Not only does the person's photo display on the iPhone when he or she is calling, but iTunes copies that photo into Address Book and if you're using Apple Mail as your email client, emails from that person show up with their photo as well!

I am now in the process of updating all my contact info, including taking pictures of people and adding them to the database. Eventually I'll be organized for the first time in my life, with names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, and more, all in one convenient place!

One minor gripe about iPhone is that the Contacts function is so essential yet it's buried under the Phone icon. My mom has a little trouble with this, occasionally forgetting how to find a contact. She'll stay on the Home screen, scanning the icons, looking for Contacts. You have to press the Phone icon and then there's a Contacts button. Not a huge deal, but a slight flaw.

The Phone function offers five tools: Favorites, Recent, Contacts, Keypad, and Voicemail. Favorites is a subset of your contact list, people you call often. I use that quite a bit. Keypad is merely a standard phone numeric keypad, useful for dialing a number not in your Contact list.

Recent shows all calls you've received or made. Missed calls show up in red. You can dial anyone by tapping their name or the number. If it's a phone number, that means it's not in your contact list. You can tap the arrow icon on the right of the number to bring up a pane which gives you more information about the number. It tells you if it was an incoming or outgoing call, the exact time and date of the call (but not the call length, unfortunately), and lets you either create a new contact with that number or add it to an existing contact (the latter is very useful).

Contacts is an alphabetical list of all the people you know. The default is to sort them by first name, which I like, but you can change that to last name in Settings if you want. Each section of names is separated by a horizontal bar with the alphabetical letter on it, A's, B's, C's, etc. The scrolling is smooth and quick. You can jump to a particular letter by tapping the list on the right side. There is no search feature, which can be a liabilty if you can't remember a person's name. I suspect that a search is something Apple will add.

One really nice touch is at the very top of Contacts it lists your own phone number. If you're like me and rarely give out your cell number, or if you've recently gotten a new number, this is extremely handy and useful. Most cell phones bury that information so deep it takes minutes to access it.

Editing contacts is usually a pain on phones, but it's really easy on the iPhone. Though I'd still recommend doing massive updates on your main computer (you can't copy and paste text on the iPhone), there's really not anything you can't do on the iPhone. It works similar to Address Book: you can add multiple phone number and email fields, and you can even customize the labels. There are places for instant message IDs, website URLs, custom fields like birthdays and nicknames, a Photo field (which lets you take a picture with the built-in camera or choose one from your photo library), and more. One of my favorite features is the "Assign Ringtone" option which lets you choose a unique ring for that caller. It's a nice way to distinguish between work callers and friends and family.

All in all, I have to say that contact management is nearly flawless on the iPhone. I really can hardly think of a single thing I'd change. My only gripe is a slight caution: it's very easy to initiate a call. Perhaps too easy. I often want to get more information about a contact and touch the name forgetting that I need to tap the right arrow icon for that. Tapping the name dials the number immediately. You can quickly cancel the call, of course, but it's still a bit dangerous. Of course, if iPhone asked for call confirmation every time I taped a name I'd be complaining about that, so there is no way to win!

The Voicemail button gives you access to the iPhone's lauded "visual voicemail" feature, which works as advertised. It works so simply and smoothly, you'll wonder why no one else has done this before now.

My mom can't stand the horrible touchtone navigation systems of traditional voicemail systems. She would get lost and have to hang up and start over. With iPhone, she just taps the message and it plays. There's a traditional QuickTime-style playbar along the bottom that shows play progress and overall message length. You can drag the slider to replay or skip parts of a voice message, which is like a dream come true. A speakerphone button at the top is convenient, and deleted messages are saved in a Deleted Messages folder where you can find and replay them. Since they are saved on your iPhone, not on AT&T's server, you can keep them as long as you want. When you're playing a message there's a handy green "Call Back" button.

The only problem my mom had with the visual voicemail was that she would confuse it with her Vonage home phone voicemail, which she has set to email her a .wav attachment. Since that email shows up on her iPhone, she has two types of voicemail on her phone. Unfortunately the Vonage emails won't play on the iPhone (I'm not sure why as iPhone is supposed to support WAV files). She would thus get the two confused, telling me there was a problem with her voicemail when she was talking about her Vonage mail, not iPhone's voicemail.

I tested the iPhone's conference call feature, starting one conversation and having a third person call in the middle, then I merged the new call and all three of us were conversing simultaneously. It worked just great -- though I'm not sure how AT&T bills such calls. Do they count as double minutes since two calls are in progress at the same time? Do we all get charged the minutes or just the one who initiates the call(s)? Conference calling could get expensive!

The bottom line is that as a phone, the iPhone is superb. It's frightfully easy to use. The fact that people who'd never touched an iPhone could figure it out in seconds is impressive, especially considering the radical interface. Contact management is extremely sophisticated yet astonishlingly easy -- even my mom was doing it and she hated messing with that stuff on her old phone. She's even started taking pictures of her contacts!

Next: In Part 10, Marc explores the remaining built-in iPhone applications.

macopinion@designwrite.com

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 1 of 10
Buying the iPhone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 2 Of 10
Activation and Syncing

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 3 of 10
Using the iPhone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 4 of 10
Customization

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 5 of 10
Exploring the Applications

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 6 of 10
Exploring the Internet

iPhone: First Impressions Part 7 of 10
Exploring Photography on the iPhone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 8 of 10
Working With eMail

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 9 of 10
Using the iPhone as a Phone

iPhone: First Impressions - Part 10 of 10
iPod on the iPhone