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My Thoughts on the iPhone

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

posted by John Walker @ 12/22/2007 12:31:00 AM

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