The iPhone is the best iPod yet. It hooks up to iTunes and essentially works just like any other iPod, but the built-in speakers make it more useful than all those iPods that must be used with earphones or ported to an external speaker. The iPhone’s speaker is good enough to be used at your desk or to provide a little music that you can share with a friend while sitting in the yard or on the front porch. Although not stereo quality, the speaker will provides enough power for listening in a hotel room or when you simply don’t want to put the ear buds in your ears. We also found the speakers useful for listening to audio books.
As shown in Figure 11, the main iPod screen has icons for the major functions on the bottom. They are: Playlists, Artists, Songs, Videos, and More. The More button takes you to listings by Albums, Audiobooks, Compilations, Composers, Genres, and Podcasts.
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Figure 11: iPod Screen.
At any time when in the iPod mode, you can turn the iPhone into the horizontal mode to choose the music by “Cover Flow.” As shown in Figure 12, the Cover Flow shows the album covers. You simply slide your finger across the screen to move through the album covers.
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Figure 12: Cover Flow.
When listening to any music that has an album cover in iTunes, as shown in Figure 13, that cover is shown while the music is playing. There is also a large play/pause button, an easy-to-control volume slider, and a large forward and back button to change tracks.
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Figure 13: What you see when a song is playing.
At first we missed the indicator that shows exactly how far along you are in the song or podcast that is playing, but we quickly found that we could see this by simply tapping on the screen while the song or podcast is playing.
Although the screen is small, videos were still a pleasure to watch on the iPhone. The picture quality is very good, and you are able to watch in either vertical or horizontal mode. The video takes up the entire screen. Again, you simply tap anywhere on the screen to get a play/pause button, volume control, and fast-forward and reverse.
