Fast post comparing the Apple iPhone to my old Motorola MPx220 Smartphone
iPhone Advantages
- Actually does video playback decently
- Syncing podcasts and video podcasts is nice in getting new material automatically
- Google Maps is much better compared to the Smartphone version
- The web browser is usable for all sites instead of a select few that work with the Opera Mini browser
- The large screen makes showing off photos a lot nicer
- Camera does not take photos that are total crap… They are merely slightly crappy
- Onscreen keyboard is much more usable compared to T9 on a keypad
- The iPhone can open many files, including Word, Excel, PDFs, etc. from email attachments! I could never do this by my smartphone! The stupid thing would not let me save the attachments to the phone memory!
iPhone Problems
- No automatic switching of ringing profiles whenever you have a meeting scheduled
- The iPhone has a physical switch that has to be flipped instead
- Windows Mobile Smartphones have had this functionality since 2004!
- Calendar synchronization is broken
- Looks like a bug in iTunes. The appointments you make in iPhone will be synced to Outlook, but any appointments made in Outlook will not be synced to the iPhone
- Lack of 3rd party applications, so no fun games, or other funny applications like tip calculators. This can be mitigated by using web apps, but the load time over the EDGE network does make loading these apps significantly slower.
- No "To Do" list, no syncing of notes.
- Even though the iPhone comes with a "Notes" program, there seems to be no way to get anything you type on the iPhone off to your computer
Overall, iPhone is great for fun use, but I wouldn’t use it in a business environment just yet. The Calendar synchronization bugs are a huge issue as one significant part of iPhone functionality is simply broken. The lack of full Microsoft Exchange support is something that also needs to be fixed before it can be taken even semi-seriously in the corporate environment.