9. Assessing Key IPhone Features, Continued

The large, higher resolution display is nice. It's too bad some applications, such as YouTube can't take advantage of that resolution due to low res, noisy images. Watching movies from YouTube is like watching a screen full of confetti drifting through the lives of the inhabitants of each digital video. However, as you'll learn in just a bit, the display is excellent when you're watching high quality movies and videos downloaded with iTunes.

WiFi performance was very good; as fast as my Vista notebooks on the Internet. I move around a lot and, while I use WiFi at home, most of the time I have to be content with wide area networking protocols. So, on we go to EDGE.

EDGE, with real bandwidths in the 50-to-90kbps area, is OK as a wide area network protocol, but as many have pointed out in discussing EDGE's impact on iPhone performance, EVDO is better (around 600 real kbps). I use EVDO from Verizon on my laptop and it's almost like I have a WiFi connection, almost. Go with AT&T or T-Mobile and you get EDGE; go with Verizon and its EVDO. This is one place where Apple may have made a wrong choice, but maybe they traded low cost data transfer, 20 bucks US, for high speed data transfer.

Bluetooth is there and works simply and well. Apple's Bluetooth headphones for the iPhone are expensive (over $100 US), though nicely designed. As you might expect, you can use Bluetooth headphones from other manufacturers as well, as I did. I can't wait to find out if this phone's Bluetooth technology eats up any less battery power than Bluetooth on other devices. I really don't expect it will.

The iPhone's 2 megapixel camera can take photos in the vertical or horizontal (wide screen) position. There is no flash. Like many standalone digital cameras, white balance is not all that great indoors and images are noisy. They are better outdoors. The 3 megapixel camera in my Blackberry Pearl is better all around. When viewing photos they are reoriented depending on whether you are holding the iPhone in a horizontal or vertical position. Three out of ten pictures I took suffered from poor auto-focusing, though I held the camera in both hands and pressed the "shutter release" gently.

Apple offers no information about the capacity of the built-in battery. Yes, another built- in iBattery with an expected 300 times recharge life. And I still haven't figured out how to open the case. This also has consequences for those who might want to replace the iPhone's SIM card. There is talk of a hack that opens the card for use with other carriers such as T-Mobile in the USA, but you have to get inside the case to change the SIM card.