So I’ve been a user of an iPhone for a couple of weeks, one of the justifications of switching from T-Mobile was that I had no reception which on a company mobile when you provide a level of IT support isn’t great, and prior to T-Mobile I was on Vodafone again with a faraday cage effect almost as soon as I stepped in the door…. so when Mike visited and his iPhone worked it seemed like there might be a solution after all…
So a few weeks in and where are we…. well I’m not quite sure I’ll call it the Jesus phone as they do elsewhere however it really is the best bit of kit on the market (not sure the Android is there yet) and with the Storm not having WiFi it was an iPhone or the Bold.
Bold – Fantastic bit of kit, best Blackberry on the market, works well, still crashes and is slow on the reboot (as are all Blackberry’s) however the raison d’être of the Blackberry is corporate email, even though the Storm, Bold and Javelin would have you believe otherwise and as ever it delivers, a Blackberry running on BES (not BIS) is almost unbeatable as a mobile device, take in the speed of the Bold and also the screen and you have a great device, not perfect, it crashes too often for that, and if you come from a Pearl (I always want to write PERL) the keyboard switch can be interesting. Is it a more consumer based device, no, BIS and plugging into a computer for the USB sync is not a great combination, in the professional market, it’s the best device out there, it has all of the right acronyms to work anywhere and has WiFi (The Storm doesn’t – WTF?)
Which kind of brings me on to the iPhone, no copy and paste (everyone knows that) no MMS (ditto) but the best touch screen / interface / mobile internet experience on the market, I’m a member of several social websites (no idea why, but I am) and they work fantastically well, they encourage you post, safari built, let’s use the internet while out and about, without even thinking about. Touch screen has always been the perfect solution, your small handheld device gets the screen size needed to relay a sensible amount of data / information to the user, the problem of course is how do get data in, with a Palm Vx (my previous favourite handheld device) you had to use graffiti, not that hard to learn, pretty effective, but was there a better way?
Apple thought so, with the Newton and it’s primitive (now) handwriting recognition (sort of graffiti really) you had at the time a cutting edge overly expensive device, that given the processor power of the time was too slow, at the time I wanted a PSION but as someone who worked as a store manager for BBV that was never going to happen and the PSION 2 wasn’t that great (later editions I would want, especially the 5) so years later and after countless rumours the iPhone emerged, I wanted one. It looked great had the online experience I was after although only on 2G to start with and promised a seamless UI.
Now I have a 3G version, the downsides, the battery life, copy and paste, MMS, that’s it. It’s the device I’ve wanted since I became a geek, it sync’s with my work email / calendar / contacts it also has all of my personal data on it using Mobile Me, (ok so we’ll ignore notes syncing) the online experience is good safari online works well and the screen is big enough, especially with the easy to master multi-finger actions. The “bundled” apps work well, but like the iPod the secret is in the extra +iTunes bit, the app store gives you access to all the bits you feel your new toy is missing, obvious omissions are a decent IM tool, and the fact that you can’t run multiple programs on the device, so if there was decent IM program as soon as you went away from it, it would close.
erm, I’m rambling.
I’ve signed up for ADC and I’m going to see what sort of things I can create to work on my iPhone, nothing useful to anyone else, but it will be interesting to see what you can do with it, and of course it’s good to learn something new.
iPhone, love it, not the Jesus phone, but there best there is at the moment.