Yeterday morning I bought an iPhone from my nephew – the plan was too expensive for him – so he cancelled it and I bought his 4G iPhone from him.
I have used Treos for years now and really grown to like them – I really like the form factor of the Treo 680. I was going to experiment with the iPhone for a few weeks on Wifi before switching.
But holding the iPhone the past day in my hand it was only a matter of time before I could not resist its lure. 30 hours after it was in my posession – the Treo 680 is off and I am 100% iPhone. Here is my experience.
iPhone Advantages
I *like* the keyboard – I thought I would not like it but in just a few hours it has grown on me – and it is better than the Treo for typing already.
The gestures take some getting used to – but they work. I instinctively grabbed my Treo stylus to see if it would work – nope – the iPhone wants a finger or thumb and works well. Also there is no need ot use a fingernail – I like that. I always scraped the paint off keys on the Treo when I used a fingernail.
I thought calendar was going to be a problem – but I am about to switch to Google calendar for my work – so along with Spanning Sync I am totally off Meeting Maker and on to Google Calendar + iCal + iPhone – full two way synchronization – most excellent. They let you use a perfectly good working copy for free for a while and then you pay like $15.00. What a deal. Apple Corp should buy these guys and include this in Leopard.

The browser is cool – but I need to learn the gestures – I wrote some code in Sakai to make the Sakai PDA portal work well with the iPhone browser and checked it late last night – it was kind of counter intuitive. Tell it that we have a narrow device – keep lines short and use large fonts… Hmmm. But it does look much nicer when you follow their style guide.
I love the WiFi – love it – love it – love it. I wish there were a way to store passwords for logging on to protected Wifi places. This would be a good feature to add.
I love the larger screen resolution – I love the fact that the keyboard is not there when you don’t need it – I can read more of E-Mail and understand it better. Funny when the keyboard pops up it feels more like a Treo and there is not enough screen real estate to compose non-trivial responses.
Mac integration is sweet – it just *knows* my mail settings and address book- one sync does it all.
Transfering my old ATT/Cingular to the iPhone was a snap using iTunes. I had to extend my contract – but I kept my rollover minutes. I will save $20.00 on my data plan too. Luckily I was only 4 Mo into this contract. Since I bought the phone used all I lost was 4 Months.
I just swapped my Cingular SIM into the iPhone from the Treo – connected to iTunes – and 10 minutes later I was making iPhone-calls.
The ATT and Cingular folks at the Meridian Mall store and at ATT tech support were really nice to me and helped me along with timely answers.
I like sending photos to my blog using real mail instead of MMS (on the Treo). I am happy to have a real mail client that will queue and retry outbound mail if the network is down. I can also queue up picture mail and then blast it out when I hit a Wifi hotspot.
Also think about this – when I am home or in some other free Wifi zone – I am *not* using the data plan – brilliant. Absolutely Brilliant – particularly when you are trying to keep the data plan reasonable. This means an auto-log in feature for Wifi would save ATT money! Because when I am at my coffee shop with free Wifi with a login – I will be lazy and use my data plan instead of the Wifi because it is fewer clicks.
I am looking forward to going internationally because with WiFi I can actually do Mail reading duriung meetings now – I am too much of a cheapskate to pay data while I am international – but Wifi is free many places.
I like YouTube – it seems to have more stuff than the Apple TV Yotube – I can lay down and watch all of the Rails Commercials or the Apple versus PC commercials from a chair – great fun.
IPhone disadvantages / Treo advantages
I generally hate any help while I am typing – I am finding and turning off any predictive stuff. It keeps changing words I type – thanks but no thanks.
I miss the five way navigation on the Treo – I could do things from memory with click sequences – it means that I need to look at the iPhone more (at least until I have it memorized).
Manipulating web pages works well for things like the New York Times that is a bunch of div rectangles but not so well for something like Sakai which are single pages – I want to move around and zoom – as if it were a photo – and it keeps looking for little square divs in the “newspaper” – kind of frustrating – it is a browser well sutited to read the New York Times it would seem. Of course – why am I complaining – the iPhone browser is far better than anything else on the market. but it would not hurt to look at Blazer and the different modes – Blazer has some nice tricks Apple might want to borrow.
I really wish the Camera had a “Mail this picture” button without having to go into the Album, find a picture and mail it from there. This extra workflow is nasty and will force me to keep my on-phone album very small – Sad. The use case that is needed is “Take this picture and send it to a pre-configured address like flickr in a single click”. Treo is not perfect but the Treo supports this work flow slightly better than the iPhone. What I want is a solution that is better than the iPhone and better than the Treo 680.
Also the photo sending program on the Treo has “Quick type” so you don’t have to type things over and over. For me all I do is put Flickr tags in – so it is two clicks to add “tags: sakaiger” to the message on the Treo – this will be very painful in the Apple – so some sort of way in the keyboard for me to put commonly used strings available as macros would be very nice. This would be useful in any app using the keyboard – although the clever design would contextualize the macro strings to the application which is being used.
As bad as the Treo camera is – the iPhone is worse in some situations – the iPhone is worse in low light and up close – when the light is good – the iPhone takes nice pictures. But I am really surprised since it seemed that the Treo 680 was really bad with pictures compared to Motorola phones I have – and the iPhone is worse in the low light or close situations. Hmmm. I don’t get it.
There is something weird with the iPhone camera – if you just point it and wiggle it around – it is like it morphs and bends the picture – it is almost like there is some compression/decompression going on that is motion-estimation (like MPEG) based becuase it seems to get confused with gentle rocking motion. I can only guess that the camera has MPEG in hardware (not yet used) and that we are using it (for now) as a still camera. As a still camera we are decoding it to still frames and grabbing them. Perhaps I am just seeing things or perhaps I am looking for something to complain about because I am missing my cute little video recorder from my Treo 680.
I wish the new Gizmo widget worked on a iPhone. I had not yet tried it – but it is the kind of fun thing you can do when the platform is extensible.
iChat would be nice – where is it? Probably not there to keep the data plan from being overrun. I doubt that there was a technical or software development timeline reason to hold it back. It is either marketing or data plan that is holding it back
Conclusion
All in all the nicest surprise is that I like the keyboard and that the iPhone calendar/iCal calendar can be made to work with Google calendar. Once I got the calendar working – the rest was almost insignificant. Switching was to be a matter of hours not weeks.
I can see a lot of improvements to the UI – that would not be hard – and could be done in a patch release. But that would probably have to wait unti the next hardware platform.