iPhone safe from latest 'killer'

NET RESULTS:I'VE BEEN playing around for the past couple of weeks with two phones, the new 3G iPhone from Apple and one of the leading phones in what, to be honest, is the wholly aspirational category of "iPhone killer", the Samsung Tocco.

How do they compare? Well, for a start I’d consider the Tocco not so much a killer as a kind of subspecies of iPhone. It doesn’t do quite as many things as elegantly as the iPhone, but it offers some similar features, including a nifty and attractive touchscreen, in a smaller package, at lower overall cost – which many may prefer to an iPhone.

So, off to the 3G iPhone. Or rather, where does one start and what can one add, when miles and miles of column inches have already been spent on this extraordinary device?

A useful angle, one usually ignored, is to look at whether this phone would appeal to the average Joe or Jolene rather than the hyperventilating geeks and gadget fans who snapped up the entire first shipments to Britain and Ireland.

The fast answer is: yes. Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. As a matter of fact this is exactly the consumer group on which I have been trying out my loaner phone from O2 and the experiment has shown why this is exactly the phone to woo the non-techie.

Why? It enables pretty much anyone, including those terrified by technology, to not just make calls and take pictures and send texts, but to use the many features now embedded into most phones that most of us never use.

This is entirely down to how intuitive Apple has made this phone and how easily and directly one can access the menu items.

I have handed this phone, with screen locked, to dozens of people of all ages and told them to play with it. At first they handle it as gingerly as a package of Semtex. They ask how to unlock the screen.

I tell them to figure it out themselves. It takes about two seconds for them to try the most intuitive option – touch the slider image on the screen, hold it down and slide it open. Voila, the phone unlocks and the menu buttons come up.

This elicits a delighted gasp every time. Emboldened, they then try the menu buttons and soon are playing videos, looking at the photo galleries, listening to songs, going online, playing with Google maps on the GPS program – in short, checking out the kinds of features that are usually so hard to access through a normal handset because you have to figure out a complicated layer of menus.

I gave the handset to a friend’s young son, who had never seen an iPhone before, and he’d figured out just about every feature, including several I didn’t know were there, within 20 minutes. (He also tried to smuggle the handset out tucked under his shirt like a shoulderpad, but O2 will be glad to know I spotted that trick. Nice try, Milo!)

Of course you can also make calls and send texts, although the touchscreen system takes some getting used to.

Okay, that’s the iPhone for the rest of us, as Apple might say. What about the Tocco?

Well, it is a very impressive handset in its own right with a lovely, if smaller, screen that has a nice visual rotation between the main menu and a smaller set of short-cut menus. It also has a little hidden menu bar that lets you drag the functions you like on to the main short-cut menu – to view photo thumbnails, play games, listen to the radio.

Unlike the iPhone, it has an inbuilt radio, which some will prefer. It also has a far better camera, a 5 megapixel number that has lots of features that place it on par with a decent standalone digital camera.

It is its smaller size which I see as a real benefit to those who don’t want the larger-screen, larger-size iPhone – the Tocco is slim and compact and easily slips into a pocket or handbag.

It also has something the iPhone needs – a lovely alternative battery cover that has a padded flap that covers and protects the screen. You just flip it open to use the phone.

The weak points of the Tocco? Texting is very clumsy because the screen isn’t quite as responsive to touch as the iPhone and the system – scrolling through letters – is more frustrating than the iPhone’s qwerty touchscreen keyboard.

No GPS, no 3G and overall, it just isn’t as snazzy as the iPhone. But guess which handset I am currently using most? The Tocco, because of its size, convenience and camera.

I will definitely get an iPhone but I am also quite enamoured of the Nokia N95 (which I have written about before) and the Tocco as alternatives with their own strengths. I wish I didn’t have to be locked into the iPhone’s separate contract, so that I could easily rotate between these handset options.

klillington@irish-times.ie

Blog: www.techno-culture.com