iPhone reviews are in – and it’s a winner

The first reviews of Apple’s new iPhone were published overnight, and generally reaction has been very positive.

Users have been impressed with the phone’s ability to handle emails and internet browsing, and as with most Apple products the sleek look and feel of the device has also won plaudits.

There are some slight negatives though. A review in the Wall Street Journal complained about the new iPhone’s battery life, and a number of reviewers have raised questions about the extra costs users will pay for data plans.

Here’s a selection of the best reviews from around the world.

From Times Online

“The most telling thing you learn when playing with the 3G iPhone is how annoying it is when someone tries to take it off you. If gadgets were drugs, this one would be an opiate…

“Imagine a regular phone and e-mail device, coupled with an extremely compelling and speedy web browser, a video player, a photo organiser, a navigation tool, and an iPod – and you get some idea of how dependent you might become on it…

“Crucially, and unlike its predecessor, the 3G iPhone is fully compatible with Microsoft Outlook, meaning that your work e-mails can be forwarded to the device. BlackBerry, whose customers have enjoyed ‘push e-mail’ for years, has witnessed many threats to its dominance in the corporate e-mail market, but none will have chastened it quite so much as this one.”

From The Wall Street Journal

“I’ve been testing the iPhone 3G for a couple of weeks, and have found that it mostly keeps its promises. In particular, I found that doing email and surfing the internet typically was between three and five times as fast using AT&T’s 3G network as it was with the older AT&T network, to which the first iPhone was limited…

“The iPhone 3G is hardly the first phone to run on 3G networks, and it still costs more than some of its competitors. But overall, I found it to be a more capable version of an already excellent device. And now that it’s open to third-party programs, the iPhone has a chance to become a true computing platform with wide versatility…

“In my tests, the iPhone 3G’s battery was drained much more quickly in a typical day of use than the battery on the original iPhone, due to the higher power demands of 3G networks. This is an especially significant problem because, unlike most other smart phones, the iPhone has a sealed battery that can’t be replaced with a spare.”

From The Daily Telegraph

“[We] received one of the very first iPhones in the country for review and it certainly lived up to our high expectations.

“Users will be impressed by the device’s slick touchscreen, which is the gateway to the multitude features onboard including phone, iPod, GPS, web browsing and email.

“We were most impressed by the speed of the device on the 3G networks. Web pages were very quick to loaded and retrieving emails took just seconds.”

From The New York Times

“Plenty of Appleholics have expressed dismay at how little the handset has changed. They’d got their hopes up for the second-generation iPhone: video phone calls! iPhone Nano! 3G hovercraft!

“But there is one towering tsunami of a feature that may well shut them up.

“It’s the iPhone App Store; a central, complete, drop-dead simple online catalog of new programs for the iPhone. Hundreds will be available when the store opens Friday, with thousands to follow. You browse, download and install new programs directly on the iPhone; they don’t have to be transferred from a computer, and you don’t have to hack the phone to use them. Most of the programs will be free or cheap.”

From APC

“Apple Australia has made numerous localisations to the iPhone that will be sold here. The Australian iPhone 3G ships with the Australian Stock Exchange and All Ordinaries Index preconfigured in the stocks widget, and the weather widgets have Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne preconfigured, which shows Apple is making some attempt to localise the content on the phone in each region of the world.”

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