iPhone - the adventure

Over the past few months I have watched the iPhone gradually take over the mobile phone market. Is it because it's an iPod touch with a phone in it? Does it allow control of the space time continuum? Being a Sony player man and a Nokia N95 owner I couldn't quite see what I would get if I bought an iPhone. I could see it looked great, had a flashy touch screen interface, and would make a great web browser. "Should I get one now or wait and see  how these new Google phones will get on" I kept asking myself. Well, my mind was made up when the flashy salesman at my company turned up with one. He did nothing but rave about it, and after using it briefly, I decided to take the plunge and dump my poor old Nokia.

Then followed days of frustration. I thought I had made a big mistake and signed an 18 month contract for what must be the most over hyped piece of useless gadgetry in the world.  Here are some of the issues I encountered;

• Getting my contacts onto the phone - synchronising with outlook.  Didn't work! I spent hours trying to get this going through iTunes but to no avail. Googling the issue showed many other frustrated people with the same problems. I had to give up and use Apples MobileMe system to synchronise. This is a premium service but I got a free trial.
• Texting my contacts with my new number - took hours! You have to select each contact to add to a text individually, and there's a maximum limit of 20 at a time. "Create a contact group and sent to that!" I hear you cry. Well, you can't create groups of contacts on the iPhone.
• MobileMe then stopped working - had to set up a Google mail account and synch all of my contacts etc. via this.
• Synchronising texts - cannot do it. I used to use Nokia LifeBlog with the N95, but no equivalent iPhone functionality.

You might therefore be surprised when I say that today I absolutely love my  iPhone 3GS! I have to admit that in some ways it lacks functionality compared to the N95, but overall the user experience, touch screen functionality, and application store make it a clear winner. The failure of synchronisation was a complete disaster, but Apple have now fixed this with the latest iTunes release and it fully synchronises with outlook as expected. The text limitations and contact groups have not been an issue since. The iPhone's conversation style text display is fantastic.

In summary, although the iPhone is still lacking the technical refinement of Symbian OS phones, it is a clear winner for me. What it does it does incredibly well. The next iPhone OS release is set to include multitasking and other enhancements that will rival Symbian. It is really needed though to fend off stiff competition from Google's Android OS.