Monday, August 04, 2008

Thoughts on my new iPhone 3G

I've had my iPhone for a couple of weeks now so I thought it's about time I posted my thoughts. I'm one of their targeted enterprise users and have come over from a BlackBerry, which although I was worried about always working, actually resulted in me being able to leave the office without worrying there was an all important email awaiting my return.

So how have I found the switch? In a nutshell as I kinda expected -I miss a few of the features on the BlackBerry but on the whole have found it to be Fairly painless. I like aspects of the iPhone such as the application resources but get a little frustrated at silly things like no copy and paste, having to reformat my entire address book or not being able to insert numbers. I suspect somewhat that there are gestures I'm missing so feel free to point me in the right direction (even if it's "wait for the next update")

I've not had a chance to try out the push aspect of the iPhone yet but I'll get around to that shortly, hopefully that'll save some of the battery life! At the moment I think I'm getting about 5 hours talk time out of it but I tend to have it sitting in charge most of the time.

My likes/dislikes of the iPhone so far

So lets start with the positive:

• The App store
• The GPS
• The easy-to-use silent button
• The community (yes I know it's a repeat of the App store, but this is where the iPhone really comes into it's own)
• The ability to easily integrate with other applications i.e. LiveTimer, Flickr and Twitter
• It's easy to use
• The calling plan

And now the negative:

• No copy/paste
• No forwarding your contacts over email/bluetooth/sms etc
• No way of marking all emails as read -this is a serious oversight
• You have to format your telephone numbers in Outlook from: +44(01234)123123 to +44(1234)123123
• When not on 3G it takes an age to download emails
• The phone often crashes when refreshing your email list (or just hangs)
• There's no search facility for your emails
• The contact list isn't as easy to use as the BlackBerry's (you could do everything from one place, with the iPhone I have a tendancy to call people when I want to text them etc)
• Sometimes, it randomly (and secretly) connects to a WiFi signal -usually The Cloud/OpenZone which is a real irritation because if you don't notice you don't get any emails until you turn Wifi off. Really if the connection times out on WiFi it should fall back to 3G.
• .the fact that if you turn off WiFi because of the above, you've got to remember to turn it on again (and I nearly always forget!)
• How some applications drain the battery when you set the phone to sleep
• There's no auto text
• Crappy call history - missing duration for each call time etc
• No scale based email polling option i.e. "If an email exists on the server, check again in 1min, if not, check in 2mins etc)
• The keyboard sometimes freezes when typing fast(ish)
• The lack of backward compatibility with iPod accessories (i.e. car chargers)
• The fact that you can't set it to backup once a week instead of everytime you plug it in -that's a royal PITA as I plug mine into two computers everyday sometimes forget to click the cross to cancel the backup

And for fairness, the in between:

• The keyboard doesn't allow you to select the most suitable one for the task in hand
• The phone doesn't always rotate i.e. in emails -which I find really irritating
• There's no "Trial" option to software, I know it's not much but I don't really want to waste £5.99 if it's a crappy app.

Although the positive are far outweighed by the other aspects of the phone, I'm sticking with it for the moment because unlike all of the phones I've used in the past, it's easy to update and I think Apple are going to fix a lot of the more obvious oversights such as "Mark all emails as read". Then again Apple may not be the saint that everyone makes them out to be. (I'm disappointed I missed out on NetShare for instance).

Long and short of it is I think the iPhone is a nice move away from the BlackBerry but there are still a few areas that they really need to catch up on.

Thoughts on my new iPhone 3G

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Tags: General | iPhone