Well, so much for me waiting for the next iteration of the iPhone before buying one :) I broke down and bought one today with a little holiday cash that came in. What can I say? I'm a sucker for pretty gadgets.
Over the past few days I've been eyeing my wife's iPhone and grabbed it whenever I could. I couldn't find any show-stoppers in terms of how I work with devices, so I pulled the trigger.
One thing I will miss is the ability to build applications on it with .NET. I may just have to move them up to the cloud as web services and build a web front-end on them. I'll have to look and see if there are any .NET iPhone toolkits out there yet to get that iPhone look-and-feel that some of the better existing iPhone web apps have.
NOTE: While I've purchased several pieces of Apple hardware over the years for my wife, this is actually the first piece of Apple hardware I've owned. Good for me.
NOTE2: My wife was PO'd that I bought one. Not because of the cash, which you might expect, but rather because for a brief moment in time had a cooler phone than me. Funny!
Tags
iPhone
Comments(1)
12/28/2007 12:29:00 AM
I
work for a small software development shop consisting of 5 employees.
We're all spread out throughout different parts of the country.
Therefore, we've all have been using our own Internet host's POP email
account for our company email. The hosting company that hosts our company domain allows us to forward
emails that come into our company email addresses to our actual local
Internet email accounts. This has worked fairly nicely, but there are
downsides to this approach. For example, if you live in MS Outlook like
we all do, you have a problem when you need access to your email while
you're away from your main desktop PC. Your Outlook and Gmail and your mobile device are never really in sync.
So, several months ago I
switched over to GMail and had my company emails forwarded there. All
has worked out pretty well. I was especially excited when they
introduced IMAP support. This means I can work in Outlook and
everything is synchronized up to the cloud. When I switch over to the
Gmail web interface, everything is there. I mentioned in my previous
post that this is essentially the Holy Grail of email.
Unfortunately,
all is not perfect yet. The biggest downside is that there is currently
a bug with support for Windows Mobile devices and Gmail's IMAP support.
Most messages viewed on the device come up with blank message bodies.
This has been widely reported and I'm a little surprised at how slow
Google has been to come up with a fix for it, especially considering
how many devices these days run Windows Mobile as the device OS. It's
been a little over a month now, and no resolution yet.
Another
downside has little to do with Gmail's IMAP support and much more to do
with MS Outlook's support for IMAP. Things are at times painfully slow
with Outlook. Seems like there are some threading issues blocking the
UI when certain things are occurring involving synchronization of
messages with Gmail. Not enough to get me to quit using IMAP with
Outlook, but enough to make me think that IMAP is not something
Microsoft is really focussed on making better (Outlook has been
notoriously bad with IMAP support for ages).
So, one can hope
that Google gets the IMAP fix out there for Windows Mobile devices and
that Microsoft can do something with their lousy IMAP support in
Outlook. One can hope, right?
Tags
Gmail
IMAP
Windows Mobile
Outlook
Comments(2)
12/22/2007 12:54:00 AM
The iPhone has been out for some time now and, of course, I've wandered into the local Apple store a few times to get my hands on it. My opinion has been pretty darned positive. It's a beautiful device and seems to be well executed. I've held back from purchasing it, being fairly content with my Windows Mobile devices.
Tonight I purchased an iPhone for my wife as an early Christmas present since her Moto Razr finally kicked the bucket. Here are my thoughts on the Out-of-box-experience (OOBE). I let my wife take care of it all while I carefully watched. I did this mostly because she's a non-techie type and is intimidated by new technology. I wanted to see how the Apple experience would be for her.
- First of all, very nice packaging...like opening a gift. Classic Apple.
- Once we downloaded iTunes and installed it on my wife's laptop (I helped with that process), she proceeded seamlessly though the activation process. My wife switched from Verizon and was able to keep her number. I found this whole process very well done, especially considering all of the complexity that I knew was going on behind the scenes.
- The iPhone synced right up with iTunes, and her contacts came across nicely.
- Next up, I assisted setting up Gmail's IMAP account info on the device. My wife lives in Gmail and was delighted to know that now everything would be synchronized across both Gmail's web interface on her laptop and the iPhone. It was like she found the Holy Grail.
- She uses Google Calendar as well, and I'll have to investigate ways of getting that info synchronized into the built-in iPhone Calendar. In the meantime, Google has done a nice job with the web version of calendar for the iPhone which she'll be using.
Of course, once she put it down for the night I got my hands on it. I was impressed with how easily it connected through to my wireless router. My Treo 750 doesn't have wireless, so it was great to browse with high-speed access on the device. I don't think I'll be buying another device without it in the future.
After about an hour on the device, I must say, I'm sold. The email interface, and, especially the browsing experience with Safari seems much nicer than Windows Mobile. I don't rely on Exchange integration, but I can understand that if I did it would be a deal-breaker on purchasing an iPhone. Oh yeah, did I mention the screen? Nice and big and you fall in love with the touch functionality.
So, will I get myself one of these? Not yet. I'll be waiting for the next iteration which I hope includes 3G support and native 3rd party applications. That said, as a long-time Windows Mobile fan, I think Apple really nailed this device, especially considering this was their first try. Gotta hand it to them. Nice job, Apple.
NOTE: The only bad experience we had was when we paid for a track using the iTunes feature of the device. The track downloaded fine and played perfectly. However, once we synched with iTunes, iTunes removed it from the device. We tried synching again, however, iTunes reported that we didn't own the track and therefore couldn't sync it. Damn DRM!
UPDATE 1: Turns out we just needed to have my wife authorize iTunes purchases for the iPhone in iTunes. Don't know why, but once that was done, the tune came down to her iPhone. I still don't advocate anyone purchasing DRM-laced tracks from iTunes.
UPDATE 2: I broke down and bought one of these.
Tags
iPhone
Apple
Windows Mobile
Comments(0)
12/22/2007 12:31:00 AM