Using iPhone

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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