There’s no cursor on the iPhone because your finger is your pointer-which, despite what your mother might have told you, is just what fingers are designed to do. When you touch a photo, Web page, or email message on the iPhone and slide with your finger, it moves along with your touch, as if you were moving a real, physical object. But the iPhone does it one better-instead of pushing around a mouse in order to make a disembodied arrow or hand move up on the computer screen, it’s your finger doing all the moving. The original Macintosh changed the world by providing a physical control to move a cursor around on a computer interface. Instead of dragging a scroll bar or clicking a mouse, you move through screens on the iPhone by a combination of taps, flicks, and other finger gestures. Using the iPhone is a tactile experience-it’s all about touching your fingers (or, if you’re daring, your thumbs) to that screen. Of course, the iPhone’s screen isn’t just for looking at: It’s the key driver in the device’s interface. On-screen text looks sharp, more like printed text in a book or magazine than drawn with pixels on the screen. Digital photos and videos look gorgeous, and even the colorful icons on the iPhone’s home screen are so bright and clear that sometimes it’s hard to believe that you’re looking at a computer screen and not something physical, like a sticker. Jamming that many pixels together in such a small space means that everything on screen looks smooth, not pixelated. Yes, it’s big and bright, but its most impressive trait is its high resolution: It’s 160 dpi, more than twice the traditional Mac screen resolution. Although I’m sure that third-party headphone makers will create numerous excellent alternatives, the good news is that the iPhone’s in-the-box earbuds are very good. These earbuds also include an inline microphone that’s also a clicker: click once to pause or play your music, or click twice to advance to the next track. The iPhone comes with a set of stereo earbuds that sound pretty good, exponentially better than the earbuds that shipped with the original iPod. (Although if the iPhone is a success, headphone manufacturers will almost certainly build their plugs to ensure iPhone compatibility.) It’s too bad that a clunky add-on accessory will be necessary for aficionados of high-quality headphones to use the iPod features of the iPhone. It’s a standard 3.5-millimeter jack-the very same sort used on the iPod-but because it’s recessed many third-party headphones won’t fit, especially if they’ve got a large plug or one that turns at a 90-degree angle. Opposite the wake/sleep toggle on the iPhone’s top edge is a recessed headphone jack. Placed right above these two buttons is a switch that slides back and forth in one position the iPhone will emit sound from its external speaker, while in the other it will only vibrate to warn you that something’s going on. But the Home button isn’t the only physical button to be found anywhere on the iPhone on its side are a pair of volume buttons, which (depending on context) will let you raise or lower the volume of the phone’s ringer, music or video playback, or conference-call speakerphone. The dominant physical feature of the iPhone is its black glass face, punctuated by a single physical button on the bottom and a speaker slit near the top for listening to phone calls. But it’s enough of an issue that Apple includes a small black chamois cloth in the iPhone box, and the image-conscious iPhone owner will want to give their screen a good wipe-down often. The good news is, the screen’s so bright that in most situations you don’t notice the fingerprints. Perhaps we were unwise to order pizza at Macworld on the day of the iPhone’s arrival, but the grease from that pizza helped make a point: the iPhone’s screen collects fingerprints. This is not to say that the iPhone is impervious to being marked up. The iPhone’s back side is a textured silver, rather than the polished stainless steel of the full-sized iPod models, so my guess is that both the front and back of the iPhone will be more resistant to scratches than either the full-sized iPod or the original iPod nano. And the iPhone appears to be built to last, with a screen that proved quite resistant to scratches and drops. It’s got enough weight (4.8 ounces) to it to feel substantial when it’s in the palm of your hand. ![]() However, the iPhone doesn’t feel fragile. ![]() ![]() Roughly the width (2.4 inches) and height (4.5 inches) of a full-size iPod, depth is the dimension that makes the iPhone feel tiny: it’s shockingly thin, measuring less than half an inch. Pictures of the iPhone don’t do it justice: it’s smaller than it looks. And with the iPhone, Apple’s hardware designers have once again wrapped the output of the company’s in-house developers into a remarkable piece of hardware. Steve Jobs proudly described the iPod as a beautiful piece of hardware that had amazing software inside it.
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