This is where the iPhone really shines, because in reality, it has a built-in widescreen iPod to handle all of the audio and video work. Like other iPods, you are able to categorize all of your music and video files. With music, you can turn the iPhone on its side and enter what is known as "cover flow" mode where you can scroll through the cover art of each album to select which one you want to listen to next. Very neat! This also carries over to the video aspect of the iPhone, where you can download and watch full length feature films. All of the music and videos are sent to the iPhone via iTunes, just like you would with an iPod.
Audio and video on the Treo 700p is not even close to rivaling that of the iPhone. But, it does hold its own somewhat well. The default audio player for the Treo is PocketTunes, which IMO is a pretty crummy player. I have never liked it and quit using it soon after I purchased my phone. The beauty of having a phone that has been on the market for a while is the availability of 3rd party software. I retired PocketTunes and now use TCPMP, which is a great audio/video player for the Treo. While not graphically as advanced as the iPhone, you are able to do many of the same things... watch movies, video clips, create playlists and have album art display while listening to music. If you don't care for the album art, you can turn off the display to help save on battery life. Again, nowhere near the same league as the iPhone's offerings, but still somewhat respectable with 3rd party software.
The iPhone uses the Safari web browser and is billed as the first fully usable HTML web browser for a phone. Judging from the demo, I would firmly say this is 100% true. It appears that after years of trying, someone has finally perfected the web browser for a mobile phone - and that somebody is Apple.
In the images above, we can see Safari in action. The biggest problem with mobile phone web browsers is being able to display a full page in the small screen area. Apple has come up with a way to break this barrier. The first image shows the New York Times website. As you can see, everything is visible, yes... but it is too small to read. No worries, simply double-tap to zoom in and use your finger to navigate around the page - up, down and side-to-side. Safari even supports multiple, "tabbed" browsing so you can have several webpages open at once. Job well done, Apple!
The Palm web browser is Blazer 4.5 - a far cry from the advanced Safari browser used on the iPhone. There are two modes to browse the internet - Optimized and Widescreen mode. Optimized mode does just that - optimizes webpages to work on mobile phones. This will make pages load faster, but often it results in errors on the page, such as weird layouts or overlapping text. Widescreen mode shows the page as it was meant to be seen. The only problem here is that the 700p does not have a widescreen display, so you are forced to do a lot of scrolling to see a page in its entirety.
Move ahead as we give a quick rundown on a few other features of each phone and wrap things up with a conclusion...
