Thanks to a friend, I succumbed to the iPhone temptation...
I had the chance to have this gadget to a favourite price and so now it's on my hand. Unfortunately I'm one of that person that is always with the phone on its hands, so I think that after some days of usage I can say something about the iPhone 3G as a business phone.
If you want to play songs, video, playing with photos etc., the iPhone is absolutely great... but this is not my usage for a phone, so I don't want to spend words in order to describe the "fun" functionalities of this device (it lacks MMS and video recording at the moment, strange at least for an italian user).
What about business functionalities? A phone that suits my business must have:
- 1) Possibilites to manage emails and calendars, with sinchronization to corporate servers.
- 2) Good navigation experience
- 3) WiFi
- 4) Long battery life
These are the aspects that I use when I'm on travel or out of office. I need to be always connected to what happens to my work.
So... what about the iPhone on these aspects?
- 1) The iPhone now supports the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol and it permits you to deliver push email, calendar, and contacts. It works really well: when you receive an email to the corporate account or you (or someone on your organization) set an appointment to your calendar, the iPhone is immediately sinchronized over the air (Push support is wonderful). You're always connected to your organization. A wonderful Windows Mobile feature that is missing on the iPhone is the possibility to view the next scheduled calendar appointments on the phone main screen: on the iPhone there's not this feature. Emails are viewed with rich HTML format and you can zoom the contents as you want (for example, yesterday I was out of office and I've received an email with a print screen error message; with the iPhone I was able to zoom the email contents, read the error message and answer to my customer.). What is missing (or at the moment I was unable to find) is the possibility to search the emails. You can scroll the emails with your fingers but you can't search them for words.
- 2) Safari is absolutely wonderful... the iPhone gives you a fantastic navigation experience and it's able to display every web page you want (it works well also with Sharepoint sites). You can zoom the page content or a page section with your fingers and you can turn the browser landscape or portrait for a better navigation. This was a surprise for me: you can see websites exactly as you can see them on your pc.
- 3) WiFi support is excellent. If you've the WiFi turned on, the iPhone is able to connect to your network and use it instead of using UMTS. When I'm at home or I'm at office, I turn on the WiFi and the device automatically joins my network and use them for every Internet operation I do. If you're outside office and you want to reach a WiFi network, the device shows you the list of WiFi network available and you can choose what network to join with a finger click.
- Battery life is always a problem for the last generation of mobile devices. Modern devices have WiFi, 3G, large screens with lots of colors etc. and all these features are really battery consuming. The iPhone battery is not super but I think it's exactly like the most 3G devices on the market. Actually I can do 2 days without recharging but obviously this time depends a lot on your usage. What I really hate is that the iPhone has not a quick way to change the battery (and so having a second battery to use). A battery with a longest life would be wonderful.
Another lack of the iPhone is a good file manager, useful if you want to bring with you some important files.
After some days of usage I can say that the iPhone suits well my business needs but if you're more "complicated" than me, I think that Windows Mobile 6.x is always the best choice.