It has been 1 week with my iPhone. My experience so far has been a good if not great one. As a long time 5+ years BlackBerry user I was skeptical of the pretty, multimedia rich hypephone.
I suppose it would be good to start out by saying the original iPhone held little more than curiosity for me. It was missing 3 key features that were must haves for me.
1. Push email synchronization
2. Downloadable applications
3. 3g data speeds.
Now that the new iPhone and more importantly the 2.0 software with the SDK was released, all of my 3 can’t live without features are here.
My first impression was “wow” a truly business usable mobile device that is also implemented extremely elegantly. The email program showed me all that I was really missing. As someone who lives in outlook and checks email mainly on my mobile device the iPhone displays my email the way the sender intended it to. Email is displayed in it’s full rich text or HTML format in all it’s glory. Attachments look better on my iPhone than on blackberry, palm, or windows mobile device. All in all the most impressive email implementation on any, yes any, mobile device.
The Internet on the iPhone is trully a pleasure to use. I have yet to find a website that isn’t displayed perfectly with the exception of flash or java media. And based on the SDK look for Adobe and Sun to be releasing plugins for the Safari browser.
PIM or personal information management on the iPhone is not only beautiful but also very robust. Never before was adding contact info easier, faster and better laid out. As someone who relies in making his living through social networking. The contact management is the best available. That said let’s get to calendar.
Calendar, oh calendar you can display my day, my month or a list. But why oh why oh WHY can’t you display my week. iCal the native app on OSX can do this and I am sure it would be an easy port to the iPhone. I have sent apple some feedback on this and hope that 2.1 or 2.2 software will solve this.
No task management however is unforgiveable. I know there are some great apps in the app store that give you a task manager, but there are no alerts or anyway to keep the apps running in the background to even enable them to do this. This is the most glaring weakness of the iPhone’s PIM software and needs to be addresses.
The apps are from amazing to silly to horrible. There are already hundreds of apps available for the iPhone and I will discuss these further in my next blog.
Overall the iPhone is great for most people from geeks to business users but like everything else out there is not perfect. But it’s close.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: app store, apple, blackberry, iphone, pda
