A review for existing smartphone users
early adopter, tech savvy, technology lover
| Pros |
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| Cons |
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AUG
6
2007
If I had to summarize my review in one sentence: If you care about having music with you at all times, the iPhone is the way to go, but if you just want a PDA+Phone then there are better options out there.
First, I have to say, the iPhone is beautiful and it's a pleasure to use. It hooks you from the first second, the phone is so intuitive there is virtually no learning curve. It's amazing how well thought out it is. But if you use a PDA daily, that is not such a big deal. Maybe it takes a week to learn how to use a Blackberry, it's worth the investment for all the hours of productivity you'll get from it. What I really care about when evaluting the iPhone is how well it accomplishes the tasks I do daily.
What the iPhone does better than any smartphone:
Web browsing: The fact that you can do full web browsing is amazing. It's not fast enough for any real browsing or heavy web-application using, but it will save you in a pinch if you need to login a website to look at a piece of information that you left back in the office.
Visual voicemail: If you receive a lot of voicemails, this will save you tons of time. Never again will you have to wade through the phone menu tree or listen to a voicemail message from the beginning because you missed the phone number.
What the iPhone does worse than other smartphones:
Missing live calendar & contact sync: This is huge. If your PDA currently syncs with Exchange or Blackberry Enterprise Server, it will be painful to live without this feature. The iPhone doesn't have push mail either, but that isn't such a big deal, it's the manual synch of calendar of contacting that quickly becomes annoying.
Bad Typing: After 4 weeks now I am close to as fast on my iPhone as I was on my Treo, but I'll never quite get there. The keyboard is painful the first few days but it quickly gets better. However, on my Treo I could type a few sentences just by feel, I barely had to look down. With the iPhone you have to stare at the screen the whole time you are typing.
In my opinion, those 2 pros and 2 cons are the biggest ways in which the iPhone is different than other smartphone, that's what really drives the decision. There are other little nice things, but I won't go into them here because I don't think they affect the heavy daily usage that really drives this decision. The one exception is Google Maps, but I left that off the list because lots of other smartphones support Google Maps now.
For me, the 2 cons cancel out the 2 pros. The ONLY thing that pushes the iPhone over the edge is having an iPod with me at all times. When I carried a Treo, I almost never carried my iPod in addition; it's too bulk to have both. I listen to a lot more music now that I have my iPhone and I love that about it.
Last edited on Aug 06, 2007
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