Vincent,
Excellent post. Fully agree with everything you said.
I am a long time Microsoft user (DOS -> Win 3.1 and on through Vista) & have used Win CE from the first day it was released on a Casioppeia in Nov(?) 1996 as well as multiple Win Mobile devices (11 in total). Haven't gotten an iPhone yet living in Japan & mainly due to a ban on camera phones at work. I do use a Touch & the UI, WiFi & Web browser are best I have every seen. I use the touch on wifi to browse the web enjoyably for hours which is not something I ever did on MY ACER n311 Win Mobile device even with its larger 640 x 480 screen & the app store as well as multimedia features are best in class. I now use a HTC s621 clone for a phone & PDA & the interface is just so limiting after using the Touch.
Is the iPhone perfect as has been said above not it isn't. Can't wait for a real GPS app, MS Office compatible app, cut & paste, skype and a no camera version would be awesome!
After using almost every generation of iPods I also switched to a MacBook Pro last Xmas to see what the Apple/OS X "hype" was and all about and no plans to go back to Windows for now!
Oh, BTW, great site! I am a long time fan of Jason since early WinCE days and keep up with the Win Mobile thoughts sites. Look forward to equally great content on this site. Keep it up!!!
Yeah, like some other folks here I no longer have much patience for the folks who see the iPhone and just complain about what it can't do compared to WM and also those who invoke the name of Steve Jobs or mention "Kool-Aid". As far as I'm concerned they just don't get it. If the iPhone isn't your cup of tea, then fine there are plenty of other phones out there. But don't assume I'm a mindless, uninformed, ovine victim of the hype machine just because I've chosen the iPhone over the competition (for the moment at any rate).
In a way I was blind-sided by the iPhone because I honestly didn't expect to like it. But after getting one for my wife, I only lasted a couple weeks before having to follow suit and get one for myself. The ease of use and the great browser combined to just blow me away. I didn't realize how tired I was of tweaking the registry, cleaning up the memory, defragging storage space, and generally trying to hack my WM device to get it to work the way I wanted it to until it dawned on me that I might never have to do those things again- and I haven't.
Is it perfect? Far from it. I have quite a laundry list of things that I wish it did, or did differently, or did better, but even given all that, for me it's still the best compromise of features, form, functionality, and usability.
I never found a WM Professional (née Pocket PC Phone Edition) device that did it for me. I loved my stand-alone Toshiba e830 (and previously e800) device, and couldn't find a WM phone that lived up to my experience with the Toshi while also delivering as a phone. I'd pretty much given up on ever going with a converged device, but for me the iPhone made going converged simple, painless, and best of all fun.
__________________ 64 GB iPad 2 WiFi, Apple TV 2, 32 GB iPhone 4
Early 2011 MacBook Pro 13" (dual boot with Windows 7), Early 2009 Mac Mini
... the iPhone doesn't do everything I want it to. Voice dialing ...
I am currently trying to decide between an iPhone 3G and a BlackBerry Bold. One of the things that I use everyday on my [soon-to-be-replaced] Palm Treo 750 is voice command. The iPhone does not have voice dialing, but there is a freeware app that I saw on iPhoneExe.com that is called Cactus Voice Dialer. I don't know if that app is any good, but it might work.
The BlackBerry Bold is $100 more than the iPhone, but it does have a keyboard. I have had a keyboard for a long time, and I kinda like a keyboard for my thick fingers. We'll see. I am leaning towards the iPhone 3G, because I use the web more than I use text messaging. I also wish the iPhone could edit Word and Excel docs, because I use them for work a lot - the Bold can do that.
The BlackBerry Bold is $100 more than the iPhone, but it does have a keyboard. I have had a keyboard for a long time, and I kinda like a keyboard for my thick fingers. We'll see.
Truth be told, I hated the touchscreen keyboard at first, and it took awhile to get used to, but now I can't even imagine myself using the tiny little specs they call keys on devices like the Blackberry handhelds and the Dash. If you have fat fingers, you'll like the iPhone much more. The spacing is much more defined and the auto-correct as you type is pretty solid.
The trick with the iPhone is not following your natural urge to correct every single entry. Just type. Speed on. Most of the time, the iPhone is good at gauging what you meant to type.
That's the hardest adjustment to make with the iPhone, and once you do, things start getting really easy.
I am currently trying to decide between an iPhone 3G and a BlackBerry Bold. One of the things that I use everyday on my [soon-to-be-replaced] Palm Treo 750 is voice command. The iPhone does not have voice dialing, but there is a freeware app that I saw on iPhoneExe.com that is called Cactus Voice Dialer. I don't know if that app is any good, but it might work.
I recently downloaded the free "Say Who" app. It is no frills for sure, but it hasn't missed a name from my contacts yet.
I have been a WM user for 4 years... went through over 8 devices.. yes 8 (i used to have a High-End Cellphone store so obviously i used to get them at a very discounted price)
Anyways, although i really liked the iPhone when it first came out in July'07, i didn't want to get on the hype & buy one right away.. i waited.. actually i waited till April'08 till i finally decided to get one & damn that was one of the best gadget purchases i ever made..
The iPhone simply put "It does what it is supposed to do, right"
When the iPhone 3G came out, got myself a 16GB & haven't been happier about my smartphone ever. It will just keep on getting better & better from here.. this is just the start
I recently downloaded the free "Say Who" app. It is no frills for sure, but it hasn't missed a name from my contacts yet.
Some of the apps are getting close, but what I really want is a BT headset-activated voice dial. When I'm driving, I really don't want to manipulate the iPhone itself if I have a choice. Fortunately, I don't need to drive on an everyday basis, so this is a manageable issue.
I guess we'll have to wait and see what Apple does in this regard. To their credit, they've been regularly updating the device.
I also agree with Vinny on the touchscreen keyboard. I'm faster on it than on my Blackberry almost all the time. The only time I find it slower is if I'm typing non-English words/nouns.
I resisted for a long time and I still won't ever by a Mac (I like to build my own PCs). I did, however, break down and buy an iPhone 3G a few months ago. I have to agree with most of the earlier comments. There are still some glaring omissions, but what it does, it does very well.
I had to customize the heck out of my WM devices to make them livable and, for the most part, enjoyed the constant tweaking. But after all this time, WM and ActiveSync/WMDC still were unreliable. I can't tell you how many times WMDC has lost all the data on my phone, requiring me to set up a new partnership and resync.
I'd like the Safari crashes to go away, but they're not as frequent as they used to be and the browsing experience is hard to beat. I still want Flash support, but not having it has been a minor annoyance.
Email through our company Exchange Server is exceptional, though landscape support would still be nice.
Not being able to create documents or directly copy them off the device is a problem sometimes, but I'm living with it.
Like many others, I find the positives far outweigh the negatives.
One of the many very pleasant surprises has been easy access to internet radio. There are several free and pay apps with lists of stations. My favorite is Tuner Internet Radio. They've cataloged hundreds of stations and sorted them by genre. I travel a lot, mostly by car. I have the iPhone patched directly into my car stereo. I have good 3G coverage during much of my driving, but even with Edge, I can keep many of the stations playing the whole drive. At home, I've patched the line out from the iPhone cradle to the stereo in my office, so I can keep listening through the iPhone.
I have a dedicated ebook device (iRex Iliad), but I find myself leaving it home much of the time and using the iPhone for reading. It's not the same experience as a dedicated reader, but the convenience is hard to beat.
I have a multi-zone Sonos system in my house. The new Sonos controller app is great and incredibly convenient. I only have one Sonos controller, so I had to remember to carry it with me through the house, or go get it to change music. Since I always have my phone with me, it's no longer an issue. Just one more reason to play with the iPhone.
I took my kids to a childrens' museum on one of our vacations, (I forget which one- in my ten years of parenting I've hit a lot of childrens' museums nationwide!) and there was a exhibit about taste buds, and genetics. Visitors were encouraged to taste a piece of test paper that had been soaked in a chemical called PTC (phenylthiocarbamide) which tastes incredibly bitter to a certain percentage of the population, but absolutely flavorless to the rest, who were incredulous that half of us were gagging at the taste of these paper strips! (Ok, you're thinking "What in GOD'S NAME is this clown talking about?"- don't worry, I'm getting there!)
To me, the iPhone is like PTC- some of us just can't taste it...
I'm a long time Pocket PC user (and Pocket PC Thoughts reader) who upgraded (downgraded?) to Windows Mobile phones a few years ago. When I saw the original keynote with Steve Jobs showing off the iPhone, I was impressed and very desirous of it, until it was actually released. I was very disappointed with the touch keyboard (nearly a decade of stylus use makes you fairly quick and deadly accurate!) lack of 3rd-party apps (a problem long since fixed in spades!) and lack of "business" support (Office doc editing, OTA sync, etc.) I dismissed it as a cute but overpriced toy (this was before the $200 price cut, after which I upgraded my opinion of the iPhone to a cute and fairly-priced toy!)
Recently I bought my wife one, since her WinMo smartphone was getting a bit long in the tooth, and she absolutlely LOVES the iPhone. I've had the chance to play with it extensively, and like the paper PTC test strip, I just can't taste the "fun" or "excitement." It's not a bad little phone, but I really just don't get it, I guess. The browser in nice- certainly the best mobile browser I've used, but not by the orders of magnitude others heap praise upon it. It fails to render the same problematic sites my WinMo phones couldn't render (in particular a terribly over-javaed corporate site I occasionally have to log in to enter data- I actually have to use Remote Desktop from my phone to use IE 6 on my home PC to access the site when mobile!) Safari is certainly nice with the "real web" look and zoom in/out, but not that much nicer than the Opera Mini browser (with "real web" look and zoom in/out) that I use every day.
I own a rarely-used 1st-gen iPod Nano, (my only other Apple product) so I only have a passing familiarity with iTunes, but never found it particularly intuitive. Each time I use it, I tend to go through a learning curve/refresher course to get up to speed again. I spent the better part of an evening last week trying to rip a couple of movies into the phone; none of my converters or "bag of tricks" I've piled up for my WinMo devices and Zunes over the years handled the H.264 format. iTunes refused to autoconvert my non-DRM WMV, AVI or MPEG videos like I ass-u-me-d it would (since it does it for my WMA audio files.) I wasted two hours converting a movie into to .mov format which iTunes loaded on the phone (without conversion), but unfortunately the file would play about 20 seconds before crashing the phone's iPod app. I'm not blaming iTunes or the iPhone (ok, maybe a little!) I assume I ripped it with some parameter outside of the iPhone's comfort zone- too high a bit rate, or an illegal resolution, or whatever, but it'd have been nice if iTunes had noticed this and either warned me, or reconverted it to an iPhone friendly format (like the Zune software. or even Windows Media Player does for "Plays For Sure" devices.) I eventually found Handbrake, though, thankfully- a nice app, and it worked flawlessly. I thought I'd never find a more DRM-crippled device/environment than MS' Zunes, but I managed!
I could go on nitpicking, but won't (ok, one more- no multitasking- every app has to reload when you switch back to it? Really? In 2008?) since one of the prior posters said it better- if you don't like it, move on, but don't insult those that do like it. I see no reason to insult a happy iPhone user anymore than insulting someone who can taste PTC. 10 million iPhone owners are thrilled, and I'm not- obviously the problem is with me! After playing with the phone awhile I thought my preconceived notions from sales demontrations and playing with friends' iPhones (great UI, great browser great media player, but not worth the "serious business tradeoffs" to use) would stick, but in reality, it wasn't that great a UI or that great a browser. I've probably been "scarred" by years of WinMo use, but I also didn't find the iPhone very intuitive. (I intentionally dove in without the manual to test its intuitiveness. I haven't cracked a phone manual in years, and would've been embarrased if the "pinnacle of design" phone required me to! It took me two minutes to figure out how to make the tiles stop wiggling when I got into the tile-rearranging mode! (Push the home button apparently!)
There are certainly some great things about the iPhone- the touch screen is very responsive, looks fantastic in sunlight, and video playback is just gorgeous. The app store and mobile iTunes is a hoot, and battery life is fantastic (at least comparitively- I could never leave WiFi on all the time by default on ANY WinMo device I've ever owned all day and get a full day's use out of it!) But all in all to me it's exactly what Jobs' called it- "the best iPod ever," but not much more. I can't call it a "mobile computer" or even a "computing platform" with a straight face when it's so dependant on iTunes for file transfer, syncing, etc. And I realize a lot my complaints are rectified by jailbreaking and running various spoofing apps and hacks (tricking the phone into thinking cellular data is WiFi to get VoIP to work over cellular, apps to allow some other apps to run in the background, etc.) but to me, that just says that the iPhone needs the same type of hacking/tweaking that WinMo is (justifiably) flamed for needing to get the devices to work like you want them to.
I'm not trying to flame, or insult the millions of happy iPhone users- I honestly think I'm just missing whatever gene that Apple products trigger a giddy response from in most people (my experiences with Macs and the iPod have been similar to my experience with the iPhone: "Is this what everyone gets so excited about?") And I certainly don't want to come off as a WinMo fanboy- I think there are serious deficiencies and lousy design decisions running through WinMo, and those who claim the "next version will fix them all" end up sounding like Cubs fans who yell "wait 'till next year!" every season. My brief forays into Symbian and Blackberry also sent me screaming back to WinMo, warts and all, however.
That's why I think I was so disappointed by the iPhone originally. Jobs had me convinced that the miracle he pranced around the stage with in January 2007 was going to be THE ONE- the phone that finally delived on the promise of smartphones, and corrected all of the glaring deficiences. Instead, IMO, we didn't get a smartphone as much as a "Savantphone"- the "Rainman" of smartphones that did a few things very well, but replaced other phones' deficiencies with brand new ones of its own.
It's a paraphrase of a very old joke, but I think it has more than a germ of truth: WinMo is absolutely the WORST mobile OS out there...
...except for all the others.
The best thing about the iPhone, for me, is that it's getting the other platforms off their duffs and trying to fix their problems and deficiencies in order to remain competitive. In a tide-raises-all-boats sort of way, we're seeing WinMo phones with enough memory to actually run their pig of an OS for weeks without crashing (instead of hours!) Blackberries with media players and halfway decent browsers, and touchscreens finally coming to stubborn holdouts like Symbian. The iPhone did change the game, and even those of us with no taste can reap the benefits.
Voice Dialing is another freeware app
and there was a exhibit about taste buds, and genetics. Visitors were encouraged to taste a piece of test paper that had been soaked in a chemical called PTC (phenylthiocarbamide) which tastes incredibly bitter to a certain percentage of the population, but absolutely flavorless to the rest, who were incredulous that half of us were gagging at the taste of these paper strips! (Ok, you're thinking "What in GOD'S NAME is this clown talking about?"- don't worry, I'm getting there!)
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