User Experience - Internet and Email

The iPhone uses Apple's Safari web browser to get online and browse the web. As I noted previously, the browser does not support Java or Flash, which makes for a somewhat muted experience. Likewise, there are memory limitations - any one file (HTML, CSS, Image, etc) cannot be larger than 10MB. If the javascript in the webpage takes longer than five seconds to execute, an exception will be thrown.

The performance of Safari is satisfactory when compared to a desktop experience, but it will suffice for the phone. Safari does seem to take a while to load graphics intensive web pages, and web pages with lots of small graphics will suffer more than a web page with one or two large images. It appears the overhead to create a connection and request an object is rather large, especially when using the EDGE network. EDGE's latencies can be as high as one second, usually somewhere between one half and three quarters of a second. So that means for each object requested it will take that long for the server on the other end to see the request and respond with the data.

The top of the page has the URL field as well as a bookmark add button and a reload button. Once you scroll down, this bar disappears to provide more real estate for the web page to display. You can scroll back to the top and view the URL bar again by tapping the top bar (where the time and battery indicator are). At the bottom of the screen are the forward and back buttons, the bookmark list, and the button to switch between pages using multi-page browsing.

Multi-page browsing works surprisingly well. Since the screen is too small for tabs at the top of the browser like Firefox or Safari, the controls to add, close or switch between pages (essentially tabs) is on a separate screen. You can have up to eight pages open, and to switch between them you just drag your finger across the screen, similar to viewing a set of photos on the phone.

The iPhone supports POP3 and IMAP email accounts, as well as several major email services (AOL, Yahoo, GMail and .Mac). The POP3 and IMAP services work sufficiently well, however my experience with Gmail wasn't as pleasant. First is that the iPhone doesn't support conversations like the web interface to Gmail. The phone functions in the same manner as the POP3 version of Gmail (which works with your mail reading application), which makes it lose some of its neat features. Also with Gmail, because of the way the system is designed, all sent messages will appear again in your inbox, even if you turn the "CC myself"� feature off.

The phone does not support corporate push solutions (yet). There is a huge demand for the feature however, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see a solution sometime in the next six months.

The other issue that bothered me was that you could only set intervals of 15, 30 or 60 minutes to automatically check email. Apple probably didn't want you checking your email every five minutes because it would eat up battery life quicker, so we're hamstrung if we want to check it any more frequently than fifteen minutes.

I didn't have any problem reading PDF or Word attachments. The Word documents were passable; there was no support for change tracking information that was part of the sent file. And in some cases, artificial page breaks did not show up correctly. Links and tables in the email worked perfectly. The PDF document was 82 pages, and there was no quick way to get to the end of the document other than to flick your way there.

The Excel document was a bit troublesome. It wasn't that large of a document, but zooming in on the sheet took 10 seconds for it to be ready again. Once I was zoomed in it worked fine however, and I was able to pan around again.

Finally, I found the animation for deleting an email to be somewhat humorous. The icon is a little trash can, and when you touch it, it opens up and sucks the email into the garbage. Pretty neat.