OK so I wanted to switch back to ATT from Tmobile on my cell phone, so I took advantage of the whole Iphone hoopla to convert over.
So before i begin i will explain that i use my phones (i’ve used Nokia Eseries, Winders Mobile, and Blackberry phones) for corporate use… meaning i need a phone first, a communication device second, and a multimedia device…rarely. But I thought I’d give the Iphone a try anyhow just to see what the fuss was about.
So here’s my review:
Likes:
HTML email and calendar and surfing – the best i’ve ever seen.
No Likes:
• Cell Reception is poor in 3G and EDGE mode here where I live compared to a BB8310 or E90 - constantly dropped calls in places i’ve never lost coverage in before. Even poped the sim out and put it in my BB8310 and was able to make calls where the Iphone couldn’t (and this was in Edge mode – I had turned off the 3G radio due to dismal coverage in Colorado by ATT).
• Lack of a real keyboard when typing long emails - Given time i could probably speed up but the lack of CTRL+ or Shift+ for alternative characters really slowed me down.
• Battery Life is poor when push mail is enabled - With the volume of email I get + 2 hours of talking time I zapped the battery in a day. Granted I was playing with it a lot so I would expect to get 1 to 1.5 days out of a full charge with my typical usage. But I average 2-3 days with a BB Curve and a Nokia E90 – PS don’t compare the Q/Dash/Blackjacks in here – we all know those phones are a joke to begin with.
• GPS is SO/SO - Go google on the GPS feature, lots of folks bitching about it – its far from the quality of most GPS enabled phones. My personal comparison is with the E90 and the BB 8310 – both of which do OK with google maps, but are pretty solid with 3rd party software like Garmin.
• Lack of key apps (IMO) like SSH Client and RDP clients – plenty of games but I need a work phone – there are more i can list but for the moment seems the appstore is full of games and very few business oriented apps – unlike the BB or the Symbian based Eseries.
• Lack of customization of sound prompts – Come on Apple – “Let a brutha personalize a phone” – Geez! You have to pay for ringtones (or use 3rd party apps to drop them in) and the only way you can currently personalize the other prompts like new mail notice, calendar alerts, etc is by Jailbreaking the phone (aka void the warantee) and then making your own .CAF files to drop on there.
Nothing more annoying when in a group of folks and someone gets a call/message and watch the pat down olympics begin to see who’s phone just came to life.
• ActiveSync bug in Iphone –
Main bug – if you put the phone in sleep mode (press the upper button so the screens not active) or the phone sleeps from inactivity it no longer polls for emails. You can fix this by setting the PUSH data setting from manual to every 15-30 minutes but battery life will suffer.
So in a nutshell – the Iphone is a great multimedia device, and if you get a few emails a day (say less than 30) it will be an OK messaging device for ya. But unfortunately its not ready for the Corporate world just yet, course the same could be said about OSX in general (I own several MACs but i run about 60% of my day to day apps in VMware sessions using linux or XP) so I shouldn’t have been surprised with the Iphone 3G.
