With all the attention given to its multimedia features and innovative touch screen, it’s almost easy to forget the iPhone is, well, a phone. And some of our initial tests of Apple’s first cellphone suggest that telephony may not be its strong suit.

In voice-quality tests, the iPhone’s performance has been undistinguished at best. Quality when listening to a call was fair. Calls from the iPhone heard on another phone were good in quality. By comparison, among the AT&T-compatible smartphones in our current Ratings (available to ConsumerReports.org subscribers), only the Palm Treo 680 scored that low in voice quality. The best-sounding AT&T-compatible phones, the Samsung BlackJack and Cingular 3125, scored good and very good respectively in listening and talking modes. And all those phones cost $100 to $200, compared with the $499 and $599 price tags for the iPhone.

Other ways in which the iPhone could use a little more polish as a phone: It has no voice-activated dialing and offers no easy way to access frequently called numbers. On the other hand, its visual voice mail (see image) offers a unique advantage over other phones. As we demonstrate in our video First Look (Macromedia Flash required to watch our review of the Apple iPhone), its interface allows you to skip listening to every message in sequence. Instead, you view a list of calls (Click on the image for a larger view) and tap the one you want to hear or click on it to return the call. The feature even allows you to retrieve messages you’ve deleted by plucking them from a deleted directory, much as you retrieve e-mail messages from your computers’ trash.

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