How to Improv Sound Quality of iPhone?

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The included earbuds appear to be standard iPod issue i.e., not bad sounding, not great. (We tested sound quality with audiophile headphones.) If you want to jog while listening to tunes on your iPhone, you'll probably have to buy different earbuds - these ones will fall out unless you have very tiny lugholes.



For iPhone users who don't work for a company with a Microsoft Exchange e-mail system, nothing, apparently, has changed in the e-mail experience.

If your company uses Microsoft Exchange, it looks to be fairly simple to set up an Exchange account and receive true push e-mail, which you couldn't do with the first generation product. We weren't able to test the Exchange functionality, however. In the iPhone's Settings menu, you'll find an option for Fetch New Data, in which you can toggle Push on oroff. This allows the phone to support Exchange andother push e-mail services.




If Push is set to Off in the Fetch New Data tab, or if the software doesn't support push, the phone uses the schedule you select every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes, hourly or only retrieves data when you tap the connect button. Only Active Sync mail applications, Apple's Mobile Me and Yahoo mail work in push mode, according to Apple. But my Rogers POP mail account, which is Yahoo, did not work in push mode.

Also, at least with Rogers service, the phone appears to only download headers, at least sometimes. On a few occasions, when we opened a message, the software went back out to the server to get the body, but was unable to get it for some reason.



This, we assume, is a Rogers problem and nothing to do with the iPhone mail software.

And setting up the iPhone to send messages did require a second step: turning on the Rogers SMTP server in the iPhone Account settings, which was not done automatically.



We had to contact Rogers to clear up the problem.

The bundled Google Maps and routing application works nicely with the built in GPS. This is not a real-time, turn-by-turn navigation system it's simply a route finder , which is pretty useful on its own. Major navigational software makers such as TomTom and TeleNav have announced full navigational systems for iPhone 3G.

We've said little here about the interface or basic functions such as voice and photography, which have apparently changed little or not at all from the first generation product.

The App Store, widely covered in the mainstream media, we'll also pass over , though it's certainly one of the strong inducements to consider iPhone.



The number of applications available doesn't rival the number available for Symbian, for example, or Windows Mobile, but iPhone is catching up faster than anyone might have expected. And this is a great, easy-to-use store for buying (or downloading free) applications.

The touchscreen interface, also widely covered elsewhere, is obviously a feature that helps put this product into a category by itself. It's simple, elegant, attractive, easy to learn and for the most part works well.



The only drawback is the reliance on an onscreen keyboard. Even though the iPhone's virtual keys are larger than the physical keys on a BlackBerry or other key- board-equipped smartphones, we found it too easy to miss the letter or character we were aiming for . Maybe it just takes more practice.

As a phone, the iPhone is excellent. Voice quality, presumably because of superior audio componentry to support the music functions, is the best of any smartphone we've tested recently. And the ability to set up voice mail to automatically appear in e-mail is a very nice feature - though not unique to iPhone.