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.