Camping crowd at Apple and AT&T stores were waiting for Friday’s 6 pm to buy the long awaited iPhone. Some of the fans were desiring to have the phone, some of the fans were thinking about to resell it for a big profit. On eBay the smart phone was offered by $US1500. Some of camping guys were trying to sell their places in the queue, one of them in New York was asking $US5000 for his place. Those, who were tired of waiting or needed to leave the queue for a short while, were offering $US200 to keep their place.

Now the question is ‘is the iPhone as perfect as it was promised to be?’

iPhone is great, no doubt, it has lots of features that makes techies’ life easy, but it is not ideal.

The main purpose of iPhone is to make phone calls, of course. It is very easy to make calls, put a call on hold while answering another call, make conference calls, quickly access contacts while you’re on the phone. You can also sync your address book and calendar of phone and PCs, while editing any contact via phone, you’ll have the contact edited in your PCs. You can sync address book and calendar on multiple PCs (home and office, for example).

But there are lots of important phone features missing, such as voice dialing. This is an important feature while you’re driving, you can’t concentrate on contacts to find the one you’re looking for, so it would be perfect just to pronounce the name of the person you want to call, and your iPhone would make the call for you.

One more trouble is with SMS service: you can’t SMS pictures from built in camera, you can only send them via e-mail.

The best thing in iPhone is its screen: it’s big, it’s high resolution, it has the brightest screen among all smart phone screens. The screen is perfect for watching videos and photos, your eyes don’t get tired, movies are almost as impressive as on big TVs.

Another great thing of iPhone is its voice: it’s clear and high quality. Listening to music is a great pleasure, it has proved to be a good music player.

One more trouble is with iPod accessories. Apple says that many of iPod accessories are iPhone compatible, but actually there are lots of accessories they don’t work with the phone, so you’ll need to buy new ones. For example an adapter that connects iPod to car stereo doesn’t work with iPhone.

Coming to the web features of iPhone we have lots of troubles here as well. The web browser is Apple’s Safari that doesn’t support Flash and Windows Media files applications. This makes difficulties while surfing the web, because huge amount of websites now are based on Flash applications.

The worst thing in web features is typing. Since iPhone uses a large touch screen, those users who are skilled in keyboard typing will have difficulties with the phone’s virtual keyboard. If you’re a hard e-mail writer you’ll need months to get used to the virtual keyboard.

Another missing thing is SIM card support. Apple has disabled this feature to avoid customers simply put SIM cards obtained from AT&T’s rival companies into the phone, so that any iPhone user has to sign contract with AT&T.

Coming to AT&T, iPhone’s exclusive service provider, it provides with internet network that is very weak. If you’re near a Wi-Fi hot spot, your internet is fast, but if you’re not… AT&T’s coverage is unbelievably slow.

For such a weak network AT&T charges too much: you must sign at least a two year contract with the mobile service provider and the contract will cost about $US1474. So to buy iPhone and use it to years will cost about $US1973.

Now Apple’s mystery is uncovered. There are lots of smart phone fans using iPhone, so you can ask for advice and make your decision whether to by it or not. by Ruzan Harutyunyan for HULIQ