My main mobile ‘phone for the past 4 years has been a UK Palm-OS based Treo 600 (I say this because the US version of the Treo 600 is akin to the Treo 650 in the UK). The Treo has been expiring for a while so I needed to find a replacement fairly quickly; I finally decided that I would go with the iPhone as it contains some pretty innovative technology.
For me, the good points of the Treo are:
- usable mobile apps (not pointer-guided)
- good keypad (for fast ‘typing’)
- good battery life
- can sync via infra-red (so you don’t need a cable)
The bad points of the Treo are:
- a race-condition which can cause data-loss in certain circumstances.
- no multitasking (eg messenger-type apps were almost unusable).
My main concerns with the iPhone were:
- basic usability (including typing on the soft keypad)
- migrating data
- Apple’s restrictive control over the device and applications allowed on it.
- restrictions on what audio/video formats can be used.
- battery life
The iPhone utilises the touch-screen as a soft keypad; whilst it’s difficult to press the letters you’re aiming at, the word matching overcomes most of the typos I’m initially making.
If you ask for a demonstration of the iPhone you’ll be shown the effects of the built-in accelerometer (eg portrait/landscape view depending on how you hold the iPhone) and also multi-touch effects such as zoom in/out in the web browser – both pretty impressive (with regards to the utilisation an availability of the technology in such a device).
The iPhone uses iTunes to sync and, on an Apple Mac, it syncs to iCal, Address Book, etc, so whatever sync’ing software you use for your old ‘phone needs to sync to those apps (or you need to import the data into those apps).
My brother tried to sync his Treo to his Apple Mac found all sorts of problems, both himself and mentioned in forums. He recommended the Missing Sync applications. I took a look at them and noticed that Missing Sync for iPhone includes a migration assistant and, in addition, also backs up SMSes, call logs, and notes (which iTunes doesn’t do).
Assuming you don’t jail-break your iPhone, the only way to install applications are if they have been sanctioned by Apple and made available on the iTunes app store. The positive side of this is that Apple should be vetting applications before allowing them; the negative side is that, if Apple don’t want people to have particular functionality on the iPhone then they will not allow the application on the store (whether it’s malicious or not). Fortunately the number of applications available (both pay-for and free) on the iTunes app-store is increasing significantly, and hopefully this will continue.
I have been hearing that the iPhone needs to be recharged every day but I suspect that depends to a large extent on how much and how you use it. Obviously enabling all features (such as wifi, 3G, bluetooth, polling email) will drain the battery, along with the colour screen.