位于耳机插口和开关之间

Talk about hype. In the last six months, Apple’s iPhone has been the subject of 11,000 print articles, and it turns up about 69 million hits on Google. Cultists are camping out in front of Apple stores; bloggers call it the “Jesus phone.” All of this before a single consumer has even touched the thing.

So how is it?As it turns out, much of the hype and some of the criticisms are justified. The iPhone is revolutionary; it’s flawed. It’s substance; it’s style. It does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones.Unless you’ve been in a sensory-deprivation tank for six months, you already know what the iPhone is: a tiny, gorgeous hand-held computer whose screen is a slab of touch-sensitive glass.The $500 and $600 models have 4 and 8 gigabytes of storage, respectively — room for about 825 or 1,825 songs. (In each case, 700 megabytes is occupied by the phone’s software.) That’s a lot of money; then again, the price includes a cellphone, video iPod, e-mail terminal, Web browser, camera, alarm clock, Palm-type organizer and one heck of a status symbol.

The phone is so sleek and thin, it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese. The glass gets smudgy — a sleeve wipes it clean — but it doesn’t scratch easily. I’ve walked around with an iPhone in my pocket for two weeks, naked and unprotected (the iPhone, that is, not me), and there’s not a mark on it.

外形华丽、超薄的机身让Treo和黑莓看起来很臃肿。镜面很容易弄脏，但不会被轻易划伤，我把它放在我口袋里裸奔了（当然，是iPhone，不

是我）两个星期，没有丝毫损伤。

But the bigger achievement is the software. It’s fast, beautiful, menu-free, and dead simple to operate. You can’t get lost, because the solitary physical button below the screen always opens the Home page, arrayed with icons for the iPhone’s 16 functions.

它更大的成就是软件。快速、漂亮、没有菜单、操作简单。根本不可能在里面转晕，因为屏幕下那唯一的物理按键总是指向那个排列着16个主

要功能的初始界面。

You’ve probably seen Apple’s ads, showing how things on the screen have a physics all their own. Lists scroll with a flick of your finger, CD covers flip over as you flick them, e-mail messages collapse down into a trash can. Sure, it’s eye candy. But it makes the phone fun to use, which is not something you can say about most cellphones.Apple has chosen AT&T (formerly Cingular) to be the iPhone’s exclusive carrier for the next few years, in part because the company gave Apple carte blanche to revise everything people hate about cellphones.For example, once the phone goes on sale this Friday, you won’t sign up for service in a phone store, under pressure from the sales staff. You will be able to peruse and choose a plan at your leisure, in the iTunes software on your computer.

比方，在周五买到这部手机后，你无需在手机商店入网，跟销售人员磨牙，你可以在空闲时慢慢的在iTunes上选择所需要的服务。

Better yet, unlimited Internet service adds only $20 a month to AT&T’s voice-plan prices, about half what BlackBerry and Treo owners pay. For example, $60 gets you 450 talk minutes, 200 text messages and unlimited Internet; $80 doubles that talk time. The iPhone requires one of these voice-and-Internet plans and a two-year commitment.

更棒的是，只需额外$20话费即可获得无限制的互联网服务，只是黑莓和Treo用户的一半。

On the iPhone, you don’t check your voice mail; it checks you. One button press reveals your waiting messages, listed like e-mail. There’s no dialing in, no password — and no sleepy robot intoning, “You...have...twenty...one...messages.”To answer a call, you can tap Answer on the screen, or pinch the microscopic microphone bulge on the white earbud cord. Either way, music or video playback pauses until you hang up. (When you’re listening to music, that pinch pauses the song. A double-pinch advances to the next song.)Making a call, though, can take as many as six steps: wake the phone, unlock its buttons, summon the Home screen, open the Phone program, view the Recent Calls or speed-dial list, and select a name. Call quality is only average, and depends on the strength of your AT&T signal.E-mail is fantastic. Incoming messages are fully formatted, complete with graphics; you can even open (but not edit) Word, Excel and PDF documents.

The Web browser, though, is the real dazzler. This isn’t some stripped-down, claustrophobic My First Cellphone Browser; you get full Web layouts, fonts and all, shrunk to fit the screen. You scroll with a fingertip — much faster than scroll bars. You can double-tap to enlarge a block of text for reading, or rotate the screen 90 degrees, which rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view.

Finally, you can enlarge a Web page — or an e-mail message, or a photo — by spreading your thumb and forefinger on the glass. The image grows as though it’s on a sheet of latex.

The iPhone is also an iPod. When in its U.S.B. charging cradle, the iPhone slurps in music, videos and photos from your Mac or Windows PC. Photos, movies and even YouTube videos look spectacular on the bright 3.5-inch very-high-resolution screen.

The Google Maps module lets you view street maps or aerial photos for any address. It can provide driving directions, too. It’s not real G.P.S. — the iPhone doesn’t actually know where you are — so you tap the screen when you’re ready for the next driving instruction.But how’s this for a consolation prize? Free live traffic reporting, indicated by color-coded roads on the map.

Apple says one battery charge is enough for 8 hours of calls, 7 hours of video or 24 hours of audio. My results weren’t quite as impressive: I got 5 hours of video and 23 hours of audio, probably because I didn’t turn off the phone, Wi-Fi and other features, as Apple did in its tests. In practice, you’ll probably wind up recharging about every other day.

So yes, the iPhone is amazing. But no, it’s not perfect.There’s no memory-card slot, no chat program, no voice dialing. You can’t install new programs from anyone but Apple; other companies can create only iPhone-tailored mini-programs on the Web. The browser can’t handle Java or Flash, which deprives you of millions of Web videos.

没有闪存卡插槽，没有聊天程序，没有语音拨号，除了苹果，你无法从别人那里获得新程序，其它公司可以通过网络提供iPhone专用小程序；

浏览器不支持JAVA和Flash.

The two-megapixel camera takes great photos, provided the subject is motionless and well lighted (samples are at nytimes.com/tech). But it can’t capture video. And you can’t send picture messages (called MMS) to other cellphones.

200万摄像头在静态摄影时表现很不错，但是它无法录像， 也无法发送彩信到其它手机。

Apple says that the battery starts to lose capacity after 300 or 400 charges. Eventually, you’ll have to send the phone to Apple for battery replacement, much as you do now with an iPod, for a fee.

电池容量在300或400次充电后会开始减少，你不得不把电话送回苹果付费更换，如同你现在对iPod做的一样。

Then there’s the small matter of typing. Tapping the skinny little virtual keys on the screen is frustrating, especially at first.

打字时还有一些小问题，使用虚拟按键会比较痛苦，尤其是一开始的适合。

Two things make the job tolerable. First, some very smart software offers to complete words for you, and, when you tap the wrong letter, figures out what word you intended. In both cases, tapping the Space bar accepts its suggestion.

有两点会让这事好一点。首先，软件会智能提供完整单词供你选择，并且在输错字母时猜测你的本意，此时可以敲空格来接收它的建议。

Second, the instructional leaflet encourages you to “trust” the keyboard (or, as a product manager jokingly put it, to “use the Force”). It sounds like new-age baloney, but it works; once you stop stressing about each individual letter and just plow ahead, speed and accuracy pick up considerably.

其次，指导手册鼓励你信任键盘，听起来像是胡扯，但这的确有用；当你不再对每个单独字母用力点下，取而代之只是轻轻扫过时，速度与准确率都相当的好。

Even so, text entry is not the iPhone’s strong suit. The BlackBerry won’t be going away anytime soon.

即便如此，文字输入也不是iPhone的强项，黑莓在短期内还无法被取代。

The bigger problem is the AT&T network. In a Consumer Reports study, AT&T’s signal ranked either last or second to last in 19 out of 20 major cities. My tests in five states bear this out. If Verizon’s slogan is, “Can you hear me now?” AT&T’s should be, “I’m losing you.”

更大的问题是AT&T的网络，根据一份用户报告，AT&T的信号在20个主要城市中的19个里排在倒数第一或倒数第二。

Then there’s the Internet problem. When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, going online is fast and satisfying.But otherwise, you have to use AT&T’s ancient EDGE cellular network, which is excruciatingly slow. The New York Times’s home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo. two minutes. You almost ache for a dial-up modem.

如果没有周围Wi-Fi热点，你将不得不使用AT&T古老的（中国连这个古老都没有）EDGE网络，那会让上网慢得要死，打开纽约时报主页需要55秒

，亚马逊需要100秒，Yahoo两分钟，你甚至会重新怀念modem拨号上网。

These drawbacks may be deal-killers for some people. On the other hand, both the iPhone and its network will improve. Apple points out that unlike other cellphones, this one can and will be enhanced with free software updates. That’s good, because I encountered a couple of tiny bugs and one freeze. (There’s also a tantalizing empty space for a row of new icons on the Home screen.) A future iPhone model will be able to exploit AT&T’s newer, much faster data network, which is now available in 160 cities.

But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles.

即使只是1.0版本，iPhone的表现仍然很老到，而且还会更好，很多工作都干得很漂亮，让人愉快，让你忘记它的缺点。

In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn’t hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t bragging if you done it.”