10. The IPhone As A Cell Phone

Making a call is as simple as pressing the graphical green button with a phone icon on the Home screen. This brings up a screen with five icons across the bottom. The first four icons can be used to generate a call; the last one gives you access to your voice mail.

Favorites: A list of contacts you call most frequently; you create this list yourself Recents: A list of your most recent calls, which is nice for re-calling a number Contacts: Your full list of contacts from which you pick a number to call Keypad: Brings up a numeric keypad for touch dialing of a phone number Voice Mail: Access to the iPhone's unique voice mail service that shows information about the message and allows you to hear the message without calling your voice mailbox

Answering a call is also simple. If the phone is not in sleep mode, just press the graphical Answer key to answer or press the red Decline key to transfer the call to your voice mail. If the phone is in idle mode, when it becomes active slide the slider to the right to unlock the phone and you are connected to your caller. A large red graphical End Call button is displayed; use it to hang up at any time.

Sound quality ran from good to just a little tinny. This was especially the case when listening with the iPhone's speaker. Using a Bluetooth earphone yielded very good sound. In all the time I used the phone it never dropped a call, a testament to the AT&T network near my office and to the amazing five bar signal inside my office. My Blackberry Pearl on the same network usually gets around three bars. Hooray for whatever Apple did to maximize the signal and prayers that it doesn't give us all some new form of Cancer. Just kidding.

Setting up voice mail was simpler than with most systems. You record your greeting right on the phone and it's sent to AT&T to be used when you get a call. The iPhone features something called "visual voice mail." This is great. You see a list of your voice messages. If the call is from someone in your contacts, their name is shown with the call notification. You can visually select any message you want to listen to by selecting it with your finger and then pressing the play symbol that appears on the message.