My Digital Life

After a few weeks waiting, O2 finally shipped an iPhone 3G to me on Tuesday, so I’ve spent a good few hours fiddling with it over the past few days.  I thought I’d post up a few thoughts, really for my own benefit in keening some notes.

Compared to the Windows Mobile phones I’m used to, the iPhone setup, activation and registration was a real mess… With pretty much every other phone I’ve used you put in the sim, turn it on and that’s it.  I’m really not keen on this requirement to register the phone with iTunes before it can be used. 

For consumers it’s probably ok, but in an Enterprise do you really want to install iTunes on your (probably) managed desktops?  Personally I can do without iTunes and its MobileMe adverts etc for a work phone.  I’m reasonably sure I won’t be the only one either.  To be honest I don’t even bother with ActiveSync these days and just do everything over the air.  Apparently O2 have some managed services that might help here, and I’ll be looking at them as soon as possible.

The other slight problem was with O2, they managed to incorrectly activate the sim’s or something that lead to a 24 hour delay in activation.  It was only with the inside knowledge of our service manager here that we managed to identify and fix the problem.  Hopefully this was a one off issue with the two iPhones and sim’s they sent over, but if I’d been an end user I would not have been happy as O2 were initially insisting everything was fine and we had registered the phones incorrectly.

Now it’s all working though, I have to say the device itself is great.  Quite a few people have told me that it’s slower and less responsive than the original, but as a new user it seems fine to me.

The apps all work well, and the browsing experience is much better than on Windows mobiles - with the possible exception of the Opera browser on the HTC Touch Diamond. 

I’m also impressed with the App Store.  I found some great apps for twitter and Facebook, and I can’t wait to see what else appears over the next few months. 

Back to the work stuff… the setup of Exchange ActiveSync was nice and easy, and the interface for mail and calendars is nice to use.  It’s be good to see tasks etc added in, but I can live without those for now.

Although I’ve played with the configuration tools, I’ve not applied any profiles yet.  I’ll be doing that over the next few weeks though.

The big omission in my mind is the ability to set a window where push email is activated.  On my Windows phones I have push setup between 7am and 6pm and manual syncs during the evenings and weekends.  I find this is not only useful for separating work from home, but also saving battery life and data charges.

Speaking of battery life… Oh dear.  Now I’m not really a heavy user.  On my other phones I usually keep wifi and bluetooth off, just keeping email pushing down and doing the occasional bit of browsing.  Usually I go a day or two between charges on my S620. 

When I got the iPhone 2 days ago it was charged more or less all day - in that is was plugged into my laptop while we sorted out the activation problems.  Yesterday I turned it on at about 10am and it was dead by 3.30pm.  Admittedly I was busy playing with it and trying stuff out.  So I got home and charged it up again and turned it off over night. 

This morning I turned it on at 8.30ish to try out hahlo.com (a great twitter app)… looking at the usage stats it’s been on for 2 hour’s 33 minutes and I’m at ~40% battery.  Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS and everything else apart from 3G and push are off.  That’s really not good.  At all.

I’ve read that the battery life improves after a few charge cycles… if not, as much as I like it - and despite the the little problems I really do like it - I’ll have to send it back… if it can’t last a full day between charges its really no use to me :(

So overall… I really really like the iPhone 3G.  the interface and user experience is much nicer than the standard Windows Mobile phones I’m used to.  I’d like to spend some more time with a Touch Diamond as a comparison, but overall it’s streets ahead.  I’d also like to loose the iTunes requirement - in an Enterprise I just don’t think that’s on.  But… the battery life so far is a killer problem.  As it stands today, mine will be dead by noon.  But I do really like it. Lots.

Yesterday I got a HTC Touch Diamond to play with for a few days.  I’ve been wanting to see one in the flesh for a while, partly because I need a new phone, and partly because we’re a Windows Mobile house here and with the 3G iPhone looming we’re thinking hard about future direction.

The Diamond… well it’s a sight to behold.   The phone itself is tiny, with sharp styling and is very lightweight.  One comment I heard yesterday was that it makes any phone you sit it next to look 10 years old.  I like the look of it a lot.  The rear surface (as you’ve probably seen in photos) isn’t flat, it has slightly raised jagged pattern that makes it look like it’s been cut from stone, or well… diamond.

The small size of the device poses some interesting question.  Previously WM Smartphones used to be the smaller option, sacrificing the touch screen for a smaller footprint.  Now however, this full WM device with all the GPS and stuff is small enough that it doesn’t matter.  I’m not sure what future the Smartphone OS has if devices are now this small.

Powering the thing up, the first think I noticed was the quality of the screen, off hand I’m not sure what the resolution is, but I’ve seen desktop LCD monitors with worse picture quality, it’s very very good.  This allows the interface to use small, sharp fonts without them being hard to see or use. 

The main ‘home screen’ interface is miles ahead of any other Windows Mobile phone I’ve used (and that’s quite a few!).  At the bottom there’s a scroll bar of buttons for the main functions (contacts, photos, music, settings etc) that is easy to use and and quite intu itive once you realise it’s there.  You just move your finger across the screen until you reach what you want, for example photos, the bulk of the screen is used to show previews that you can then scroll through.  It’s all great looking and reasonably well thought out.

In fact, in terms of the user interface I’d say the worst thing was the underlying Windows OS.  Once you find a function or task that isn’t covered by the HTC installed user interface, the jolt of going back to the old Windows Mobile interface is quite shocking.  I’ve always got on quite well with WM before, but the Diamond really does highlight that MS need to start concentrating on the ‘Mobile’ part of their OS not the ‘Windows’ part.  The normal windows like GUI just doesn’t cut it in the mobile space anymore.

Would I buy one?  Not sure… If there wasn’t a 3G iPhone just days away then yes, without a doubt.  As it is I’ll wait and see.

Spotted a nice new service over over on Jason Langridge’s Blog.  Dashwire syncs Windows Mobile (and soon Symbian apparently) phones and PDA’s with a web service. 

I’ve only just signed up but it looks pretty cool.  It runs a client on the device that syncs all your basic phone info (contacts, bookmarks, SMS’s etc) as well as integrating with services like Flickr and Facebook  for photos.  Interestingly it can also post status updates (and other Tweeting goodness) to Twitter.

The killer bit of functionality for me is the ability to Sync configuration from device to device.  I’ve not tested it yet, but I change my phone loads as I get to test out new toys devices for work, so this could save me loads of time.

Check it out over on dashwire.com