A further review: iPhone is very cool, not perfect

I distrust perfection, so when I finally got my hands on an Apple iPhone, the sheer delight of the experience made me nervous. Yes, I know what I wrote just over a week ago: "The iPhone is exactly as cool as you've heard, and then some," and I meant it. But I'd been given a mere half-hour of play time with the luminous little gadget -- not nearly enough to seek out its inevitable blemishes.

As Apple hadn't seen fit to provide a test unit, there was only one thing to do: Buy an iPhone and live with it for a few days, to find out if it was really that good. My employers agreed to stake me the $600, but who knows? I might like it enough to buy it for myself.

Not quite.

Despite the iPhone's indisputable cool, it would have to be well-nigh perfect to get $600 out of my wallet. And it's a long way from perfect.

Its worst problem, by far, is the iPhone's feud with Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook. A good deal of my life story for the past decade is tucked away inside Outlook, a combination e-mail program, address book, and appointment calendar that's arguably the best bit of software Microsoft makes.

So I was delighted to see that the iPhone is designed to "sync up" with Outlook, copying all your addresses, phone numbers, and appointments into the phone. That means you can find your Outlook phone numbers on the iPhone, then just tap a number to dial a call. Deeply cool, when it works.

And it did -- eventually. But it took about a dozen tries before the iPhone copied the Outlook data stored on my PC at the Globe; it's never worked on my home machine. I'm not alone in this; a quick Internet search found at least a dozen complaints from iPhone owners with similar problems. Either the iPhone won't sync with Outlook at all, or it does so intermittently or incompletely.

This is no minor glitch for the millions who rely on Outlook for keeping track of phone numbers and addresses. And while we all love to take potshots at Microsoft's buggy software, I can't see how this is their fault. My 10-year-old hand-held computer works just fine with Outlook. What's Apple's excuse? They need to take care of this, and fast.

Once this glitch is repaired, I'll still have plenty of iPhone gripes. For example, what's wrong with its GPS navigation system? Sorry, trick question -- this $600 marvel lacks GPS, a feature built into the Verizon Wireless phone I got for free when I renewed my contract last year.

Instead of GPS, the iPhone gives you a superb implementation of Google Maps. Touch an address in the address book, and up pops a map of the place. Type in your present address, and get turn-by-turn instructions on how to get there. Who needs GPS?

Anybody who's lost, that's who. With GPS, you don't need to know where you are; the phone finds out for you. This function is now common in the cheapest phones, so its absence from the iPhone is bizarre.

The price, the Outlook bug, and the lack of GPS are all deal-killers for me, but there are a bunch of less-irksome flaws.

For example, the iPhone is available only with AT&T Inc.'s wireless service, which features a rather slow data network, so punching up Web pages and YouTube videos can be a bit of a drag. AT&T's building out a faster network, but the first-edition iPhone won't be able to use it. Apple could have included the necessary chips, but left them out to save battery power. When AT&T's system is ready, you'll need to buy a next-generation iPhone to see the kinds of data speeds already available through Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel.

The iPhone is also useless as a data dump. Plug a regular iPod into a computer, and it acts as an external hard drive. You can carry important files on it, then access them on any computer. I keep some software programs on mine, and run them right off the iPod. That's not happening with the iPhone. It holds music, videos, and that all-important address book, but most other file types are forbidden.

I could list a few more gripes, but you get the idea. Or do you? Don't go away with a bad opinion of the iPhone. Its flaws are mostly rookie mistakes, the kind of bungles you'd have found in, say, the original iPod or Macintosh computer. They'll be set right in a couple of years, even as mass production drives down the iPhone's cost. We'll see a new generation of iPhones then, with prices fit for a journalist's budget.

But only if you affluent gearheads turn a blind eye to the iPhone's foibles and buy them anyway. If you've got the cash to spare, by all means buy one -- for my sake.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.