Jobs said that this was the best iPod the company
has ever made, and we have to say, we completely agree. We are
not audiophiles, but from whatever we know about this phone till
now, we think it is going to be at the top of the list of wants of
every music listener this Christmas. The iPod makes full use of
the touchscreen interface and managing and playing songs
through the touchscreen seems so fluent and natural, it gives the
impression you’re actually touching your music. The large
widescreen is easily the best one to watch videos on. No longer
does one need to squint on a tiny screen while watching videos on
the move. Finding music seems to be faster due to the easily
navigable interface, and the presence of OS X must mean more
powerful searching and sorting features. The album art looks
gorgeous on the large display, there is a built-in speaker and there
is Cover Flow, for the first time on an iPod. And unlike in iTunes,
the Cover Flow on the iPhone is actually useful, and we can see
that becoming the preferred mode of browsing through their
music for most iPhone owners.
Get Started With the new iPhone
To get started with the iPod, you push an orange iPod icon on the
lower right hand corner of the iPhone screen. Once in the iPod
interface, we see five buttons across the bottom—Playlists, Artists,
Songs, Videos, and More. The first feature one needs to be
acquainted with is the scrolling. To scroll through a list of
anything, you just place a finger lightly onto the screen and flick
it in the direction we want to scroll to. So if you want to scroll the
list of songs up, you just flick your finger in the upward direction
and it scrolls like butter. The animation gives you a feel that it is
rubber banding up and down.
Playing Songs on iPhone , creating play lists
To play a song, you click on the “Artist” button, scroll through the
artists and tap on the one you want, and a list of albums pops up,
followed by a list of the songs for the album you chose. Now there
is a “Shuffle” option at the top. You can either hit that to play the
whole album in any order or simply chose the song you want to
play. What follows is not only a treat for the ears, but for the eyes
as well. The name of the artist, followed by the title of the song
and the album is displayed in a bar at the top. There is a “Back”
button to go back to the list of songs and a flip button to rotate
the gorgeous album art displayed below. If you intend to buy an
iPhone when it comes out, it is time to start tagging that cluttered
library properly along with the album art. It will be worth it. The
Previous, Play/Pause and Next buttons are at the bottom of the
display followed by the volume control bar. For some reason,
there seems to be no indication of the length of the track or the
current playback position on this screen. This is quite odd, and
we can only hope that they include those in the final shipping
version. When you flip the album art around, you can see all the
tracks in the current album complete with the track number and
duration for each. At the top of the screen, there is a provision
for rating the currently playing album on a scale of five stars, like
in iTunes.Now comes the most interesting part: you can simply
turn the phone around and hold it horizontally while the iPod is
running. The phone senses the change in orientation,
automatically switches to landscape mode, and displays Cover
Flow. Here you can simply browse through the covers using the
flicking gesture with your finger and tap on any cover to have it
flip around and display the list of songs in the album. This is an
added functionality, lacking in iTunes, and it makes Cover Flow
very useful. Click on any song to start the playback. At the bottom
left-hand corner of the Cover Flow screen is the Play/Pause button,
and there is an “Info” button at the right-hand corner which,
according to our presumptions, will show you all the relevant
information about either the currently playing album/track or of
the album which is at the forefront in the Cover Flow navigation.
After you’re done, simply rotating the phone back to its upright
state brings you to the currently playing screen described
above.Of course, as with the iPod, you can make any number of
playlists and play them conveniently. The “More” tab houses six
other options—Albums, Audiobooks, Compilations, Composers,
Games, and Podcasts. Selecting the “Albums” option lists all the
albums stored on the phone in a list with a small thumbnail of the
album art and the title of the each album. All the other options are
pretty self-explanatory. The presence of the “Games” option
indicates that Apple will develop games that take advantage of the
iPhone’s huge touchscreen. However, this feature was not
advertised at Macworld—maybe because no games has yet been
developed that could be shown off to the audience.Watching
Videos on iPhoneClicking on the “Videos” tab brings up all the
videos stored on the phone. The videos are organised under the
following categories—Movies, TV Shows, Music Videos, and
Podcasts. Each video is represented by a thumbnail, the title,
artist, episode number, and the length. Click on any video and it
starts playing it in the landscape orientation. There is apparently
no provision for playing movies in the vertical position (though
we do not see any need for that). All of them are played in full
screen mode with no controls to obstruct the view. Tapping on the
screen brings up the onscreen controls. There is a “Done” button
at the top left corner that takes you back to the list of videos
followed by the scrub bar for jumping directly to any position in
the video. You can see how much of the video has been played on
the left side of the bar and the remaining duration on the right.
There is a small button with two diagonal arrows facing each other
but its function is not known as yet. Towards the bottom of the
screen are the standard controls—Previous, Play/Pause, Next, and
volume control. Widescreen movies are played with an aspect ratio
of 16:10 by default (i.e. it takes up the whole screen and cutting
out a little bit on both sides) and double-tapping on the screen
while the movie is playing restores it to the default aspect ratio.
Double-tap again to toggle back and forth. The iPhone also
remembers how much a video has been played and if a video is
quit in between and watched again a week later, it continues from
that point on.Jobs describes the response he got from an Apple
employee about the iPod functionality of the iPhone~”You know, I
was showing this to somebody; I was giving a demo to somebody
a little while ago who’d never seen this before inside Apple and I
finished the demo, I said, ‘What do you think?’ He told me
this—he said, ‘You had me at scrolling.’” Indeed, this seems to be
the best portable media player in the market till date, and things
are only going to get better with each revision. All in all, we think
we can safely conclude that the iPhone truly excels in the media
department.
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