Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Wow. It has been a long time since I’ve been so excited about a piece of technology. Perhaps when I first got an iPod nano.
This is not a review. I expect to post something more detailed later. This is a more of what I know, and what I don’t know .
note: this is my first iPhone. I have been using Windows Mobile for the past 5 years since the release of the original MPX-200. I currently own a Samsung BlackJack II and prefer the “standard” over the “professional” incarnations of Windows Mobile. I own 2 iPods, a Touch and 3G Nano and have owned 8 iPods in my life. I have used almost every PDA (Zarus, Newton, Palm Pilot, various Palms, Treo(s), PocketPC(s)).
I’d also like to point out that at least 5 people I know insisted that they were not going to get iPhone 3Gs. By Sunday night each of them were proud new owners. I expect this number to grow.
It’s an iPod!
The iPhone is a fantastic iPod. Better than the Touch for a few reasons:
And it goes everywhere with me, which my iPod does not.
It’s a Computer
The things I can do with it are awesome. Real Web Browser. Install great applications that take full advantage of the hardware (location, wifi, touch).
Everything is consistent. It’s a thing of beauty.
You know it’s good when all the Applications consistently adhere to a set of guidelines.
It Sync’s to Exchange
Yipee, for now it works well with our corporate Exchange servers with a set of notable bugs (below under the bad).
Reading mail on this device is a thing of beauty. The rendering is much better than Windows Mobile.
The Applications
The whole experience around Apps is awesome. I’ll cover my favorite applications later. Some are just fantastic (SmugShot, OmniFocus, New York Times, Apple Remote). I have many more to try out.
A big plus is that like FireFox Add-ons there is a centralized update mechanism so that you can ensure you are using the latest version (like websites!). So long 90s era check the web site to get an update.
Location
Wow, every app pretty much supports this. It’s a phenomenal feature to have baked in. From Yelp, to Maps, to GeoTagging of Photos…
The Keyboard
Much better than I thought, although it’s hard to use the iPhone in bed since the weight is pushing it out of your hands.
The Experience
The UI is fluid, emotional. The Hardware is like artwork. It’s a joy to interact with.
Hardware Issues
It appears Apple deprecated a common way of charging iPods and iPhones. Every recent iPod/iPhone till now has supported charging via FireWire and USB. Many after market accessories have always used FireWire interfaces to charge over the Apple Dock Connector even though Apple has suggested that they switch to USB. Well, iPhone 3G removed support for FireWire and as such my 2 car kits will not charge my iPhone. Since FireWire is 12V vs USB 5V you can see why maybe the car folks weren’t in a hurry to switch. This is a bummer.
Exchange Issues
I have noticed the following bugs with Exchange ActiveSync:
1) When you reply all to an email your own address is included in the CC line. This is not expected behavior. Email clients always strip out the recipient's address from Reply-All. See Outlook, Windows Mobile 6 (previous versions of WM had this same bug) and every other email product.
2) by default iPhone sync's all the Contacts on the Server in every folder rather than just the default Contacts folder. This behavior should be modified to only sync the default folder or should be configurable for the user. To make matters worse, the Contacts app is dog slow on iPhone.
3) The reply/forward status of a message is not sync'ed with the server. When you reply to a message on iPhone the exchange server does not have the reply flag set on the message. As such in Outlook the message does not look like there was a reply. Can’t believe they missed this one.
4) No Peak/Off Peak schedule. On my Blackjack I would sync using a schedule during peak hours and use Push off-peak. This saved my battery and I really didn’t need push during the work day since I sit in front of a computer all day.
Battery Life
Hmm, it sucks. Ok? If you want Good Battery Life here is a guide on how to make your iPhone 3G exactly like an iPhone original.
I’m trying a number of things to see if I can get it to last a day. Step 1, turn of Push email. I don’t need that anyway. Step 2, turn off Wifi. Lets hope I don’t have to since I’m addicted to controlling my Apple TV with the Remote.
Performance and Stability
Not perfect. Lots of times the iPhone hangs. Loading Contacts is glacial. Unlocking entering PIN stutters.
Applications crash. Sometimes the cause the whole iPhone to reboot (what is this, 1998?). My Windows Mobile Phone NEVER rebooted because of a crash… it just stopped working and I rebooted it!
Also today my Location services totally stopped working. No idea why. I had to reset my location settings to get it working.
Pausing/Playing audio via the headphones is buggy. Sometimes the iPhone goes dead till you wake it from Standby.
Album art on the Apple Remote is flakey at best, and you can’t control the volume of an Apple TV.
Tethering
There is of course no tethering support for the iPhone meaning I cannot connect it to my laptop to surf the web like a Windows Mobile Phone. I hope an app comes out to support this in the future.