GWAPOINTS rates the Apple iPhone

When the Apple iPhone was announced, it immediately caused a stir in the mobile phone industry with all the bells and whistles this baby WILL carry most of which are too good to be true. I mean, that much power in such a small package?? Come ON!!

But then again, the device will not be released by just any company. We're talking about Apple here, folks. 1997 was the year of the Apple when Steve Jobs came back and led the revolutionary "i" market with the iMac, iPod, iBook, so on and so forth and I feel that whatever Steve Jobs would think of, it would definitely be a good product, no doubt about that.

So for the past 2 years, many people have claimed to have seen this "IPHONE" which should be an iPod with phone features. Same to how Smartphones are PDA's with phone features.

Anyway, this type of marketting strategy was cheap but VERY effective.

ANYWAY!!! To cut the long story short, hundreds upon hundreds of unlockediPhone were suudenly made available in the Philippines long before the rumorred January 2008 release. And it's still not officially here. Damn!!

My brother was given an iPhone as a Christmas gift who he lovingly gave to his wife after 2 or more cigarettes thinking whether he should surrender the thing or not and today, I was lucky enough to get a hold of one.

Well, not exactly, last Tuesday, Magoo showed me his iPhone where he got really cheap somewhere in Alabang. Since he onnly stayed at the place where I was for a short time, I was not able to play around with it.

Going back to the story. My sister-in-law showed me her iPhone and my brother asked me if I can tinker with the unit to see if I can make some of the things work. (NOTE that since the iPhone has not officially been released yet, OTA (Over-The-Air) settings for any network has not been fixed yet.) but since I used to work at Technical Support for Palm, setting it up manually should be a cinch.

Since we use Globe Telecom as our provider, and I'm using a Palm Treo 680, it is pretty easy to extract the settings from the Treo to try and apply it to the iPhone. Unfortunately, my sister's SIM card has not been set up for GPRS nor MMS and going back to my previous paragraph, OTA settings would be useless.

Can't remember precisely (but when I see Camille, I'll take note of the steps I did and get back to you on that if the settings are wrong), but on the iPhone I went to SETTINGS > PHONE > NETWORK >SETTINGS.

Then for the following questions, here is the data I provided (these are similar steps when we manually placed the data for the Palm Treo 750):
APN: internet.globe.com.ph
USERNAME: globe
PASSWORD: globe

Tried connecting to the web and the "EDGE not set up on this phone" message came up. To find out that my sister's SIM has not had GPRS or MMS set up yet. So we had to use my SIM to really find out if the settings were correct.

We had to look for a blasted paper clip to get the SIM tray out of the iPhone before anything else.
Nice thing about the iPhone is that you do not need to turn the unit OFF then ON to have the phone detect the SIM, so on the step alone, I was impressed.

Launching SAFARI on the device automatically brought us to the YAHOO website ay an impressive speed.

Other than trying to look for how to setup the INTERNET for the iPhone, oveall, only GEEKS would enjoy this. Laymen would get the iPhone for Wi-Fi, Internet and not the basic phone features like GPRS/EDGE or MMS.

What sucks though is the way some applications are set up. For example, the way we understand the HOME screen is where everything else is easily accessible. Contacts is not one of them? Why? I do not know.

Still, I'd give this Apple iPhone 3 GWAPOINTS.