January 2000

InfoGear Technology Corp.
Redwood City, CA 94061
650-568-2900
www.infogear.com

Price: MSRP - $399

RATINGS (0-5)
Installation: 4
Documentation: 3.5
Features: 2.5
GUI: 3
Operational Testing: 3.5
Overall: D

The iPhone by Infogear is a hybrid Web browser/telephone/digital answering machine. The concept is great, its numerous “bells and whistles” are impressive, and InfoGear deserves credit for being the first to market among the announced competitors. The answering machine and telephone functionality are fine, but in a one-month trial we found that it lacks many of the features that we expected to find — and bells and whistles don’t necessarily make a good product. It is relatively expensive, it can’t be networked or attached to a printer, its screen is monochrome, the Web browser can’t handle Java, and it lacks multimedia (the microphone and speaker work only with the answering machine functions). In our opinion, this product’s drawbacks counter its advantages (like the option of using your own ISP or the InfoGear network), and it lacks the important features that today’s Web surfers demand. We urge you to consider your needs before pulling this vehicle onto the information superhighway — its features may be useful for the complete novice, but compared to even a low-end PC, it’s like driving your father’s AMC Gremlin in the slow lane of the cyber speedway.

INSTALLATION
When you unpack the iPhone, you find two telephone cords, an AC adapter and power cable, two styluses, a handset and cord, an instruction manual, and a registration/configuration form. Cabling the device is easy: attach the power cable to the AC adapter, then plug the AC adapter into the power port on the unit’s back side (it only fits in one way). Plug in the handset. Next, plug in one telephone wire from the voice jack to an analog line and, optionally, plug in a second analog line to the data jack. No printers currently work with the iPhone (as of mid-November), although a printer port is available. A port labeled “serial” is next to the printer port, but no information was available about what this port is used for —diagnostics and future peripherals are our guess. Also, note how the unit’s screen tilts and how the keyboard retracts. Before setting up the device, take a good look at it — there is a speaker, brightness and contrast controls, a message-waiting indicator lamp, LED indicators for the voice and data connections, flash-hook and hold buttons, and four-directional scroll buttons. There’s also a stylus cradle (which we didn’t use, in favor of sticking the stylus to the screen with self-adhesive Velcro); volume, mute, and speakerphone buttons, and a standard 12-button telephone keypad. A small microphone is on the unit’s left side, next to where the handset plugs in. Finally, make sure you allot enough desktop space for the unit to sit with the keyboard fully open without wobbling — you’ll regret it later if you don’t, because the points where the keyboard attaches to the case seem flimsy.

There are instances where a “techie” person would buy and use an iPhone, but mostly it’s for people who want basic access without the perceived burden of operating a computer — such devices, say the mainstream media, are the future. The iPhone passes the Homer Simpson “technophobe test” for its physical installation, but it fails for its configuration. If you read this magazine, then you know that configurations are almost always more difficult than physical set-ups. There are enough features and options to configure to delight an engineer, but it’s too much for novice users. Just as most consumer software includes “typical” and “advanced” setup wizards, we suggest a dual-mode iPhone, so users could choose an expert mode or a typical mode with the more complex settings chosen by default. Better yet, we’d like to see different physical versions — perhaps the iPhone and a less expensive iPhone-light, which would abandon the telephone and answering machine/voice mail functions, resulting in a Web- and e-mail-only appliance.

Although the iPhone works fine as a telephone and digital answering machine without any further configuration, that’s not why you’d spend $300 for it. To make it work online, users conduct a one-time configuration and registration process. To do this, first select the Settings icon from the lower right side of the GUI (yes, your fingertip works, but the stylus won’t leave smudges on the screen). Here you’ll find seven tabs; they are Time, Dialing, Sound, Identity, E-mail, Internet, and Advanced. We suggest going through them one at a time to familiarize yourself with the unit. Their options include:

• Time (and date) — configuration is easy.
• Dialing — configure the international and outside lines prefixes, default area code, long distance prefix, seven-digit dialing areas, ten-digit dialing areas, tone/pulse, and link here to the voice mail, answering machine, and speed-dial setups.
• Sound — select one of 10 ring choices and configure sound-enabled events.
• Identity — optionally, input your name and address, and find your unit’s serial number.
• E-mail — name your e-mail profile, edit a profile (up to four, for using your own ISP instead of the InfoGear network), configure two daily e-mail checks, select online text size (regular or large).
• Internet — configure automatic disconnection time, disable call waiting, select whether to use one line for voice and data or to use separate lines, input account name, password, code, dial-up telephone number, use PPP, configure TCP/IP settings.
• Advanced — calibrate the screen, clear browser cache, choose directory sort type, register/re-register the unit, change the iPhone mode switch, configure when the message indicator lamp comes on (there’s also an enable printer option here for future use).

DOCUMENTATION
The available documents include a registration/configuration worksheet, a 32-page manual, and the online help. The manual is good; we especially like its explanation of “What is the Internet?” and related questions. The online help is informative and well organized, as are the manual’s troubleshooting and how-to sections, but most of the useful information is only in the online version. This presents a concern: what if your problem is that you’re having trouble getting online? We found the technical support staff knowledgeable and patient, although they seemed stumped when we asked how long the screen stays on for before it powers down. Our advice: if you’re a reseller, include your own field notes, and advise beginners to enlist the help of their local computer guru.

FEATURES
Without the Internet aspects, this product would just be a glorified 15-minute digital answering machine with some clever features like the ability to program in your LEC’s voice mail options, impressive directory features, and a speakerphone. It also features caller ID blocking, an “answer call waiting” button, call return, call forward, and three-way calling. We’ll spare you the telephony details here, because without the online functions, those features don’t warrant product review status.

Web access and e-mail are what you buy this for. Selecting the Internet icon from the main menu brings you to the most recently cached page, or to InfoGear’s “Welcome to the Internet” page if the cache is empty. A toolbar across the browser’s bottom edge changes depending on what feature you’re currently using, but by default, the toolbar items include main system menu, main phone menu, back, home, reload, go, search, go to bookmarks, and add bookmarks. The “go” link is very basic: the menu contains a text box where you input a URL, a list of recently visited sites, a visit button, and a clear-entry button. As a browser, it is functional for simple pages, but it is vastly inferior to PC-based browsers like Navigator, Internet Explorer, or Opera. Other features of the browser include support for HTML 3.2, HTTP 1.1, SSL with 128-bit encryption, parental content control, .GIF/.JPG support, frames, cookies, forms, and tables.

The e-mail client is equally oversimplified. Choose the compose option, and your only options are To:, Cc:, Subject:, and a “send me a copy” feature. By default, the software includes a basic signature at the end of your outbound messages, which you can edit from the Settings/e-mail icon of the main menu. There’s also a “finish later” option, and a directory where you can enter up to 800 names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and notes. Its other features include POP3/SMTP support, four unique mailboxes, sort by sender/subject/date, a “leave mail on server” option, offline composition, forward, and .GIF/.JPG attachments.
Other features of the iPhone include an internal 56K modem, software upgradeability, a 7.4-inch, 16-shade gray-scale display, 640 x 480 resolution, and access to the InfoGear content network. This content is also available to resellers for use in other devices, like Web phones, PDAs, cellular phones, and hybrids.

OPERATIONAL TESTING AND ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
Normally, “operational testing” and “room for improvement” are separate sections, but we’ve combined them here. The reason is that as an Internet device the iPhone is terrible; even the people in the beginners’ niche that it is designed for will quickly outgrow it and demand real features. During the one-month trial period in which a TMC Labs engineer used the iPhone as his regular telephone, we concluded that as a telephone, the device works fine — we particularly liked the physical volume controls, the selectable ring tones, and most of the physical casing and button design. But the e-mail client is virtually useless compared to Outlook — or even to Hotmail or Eudora. The browser and LCD need to be considered together: since the screen is so small, almost every Web site we visited would not fit within its confines. (Today’s Webmasters already have to code for Internet Explorer, Navigator, Palm devices, Windows CE devices, text-to-speech sites that read content over telephones, Webphones, etc., so the last thing they need is another strange screen size and a proprietary browser interface for every new online appliance.) The biggest drawback is that Java and multimedia support aren’t included. The product could also use a way to include hyperlinks within e-mail, and a way to send links to e-mail directly from the browser. We could go on comparing the browser and e-mail client to the TMC Labs standards, which are Internet Explorer 5.0 and Outlook 2000 — but the list of features new to those versions compared to IE 4 and Outlook ’98 is by itself longer than the list of iPhone features.

CONCLUSION
Theoretically, if the iPhone were less expensive and had a better browser and e-mail client, you could buy one, enable the larger font size, and entrust it to your grandmother. But in reality, the iPhone’s learning curve is vertical for beginners. This product fails the test: it is complicated for beginners to learn, its feature set is inferior; it is expensive; and its documentation is adequate but inconsistent and poorly organized. The online functions were ideal for the Internet of three years ago, but they are almost useless for the Internet of tomorrow. We are anxiously awaiting the domestic release of Alcatel’s Internet appliance, which is already available in France — we expect that product to be superior to InfoGear’s iPhone, given Alcatel’s size, experience, and resources. It is difficult to predict the future of Internet appliances, but unless some major improvements come about, we don’t expect InfoGear’s iPhone to blaze the way.