It’s hard to believe it, but it’s now been over a month since Apple released the iPhone and I joined the “ranks” of Blackberry to iPhone switchers. I am still completely satisfied with having made the switch, but there are a few observations I would like to make about issues that weren’t obvious by my ‘Week 1′ post.
Typing: I’m finding that I getting to be faster, and am certainly doing better than I ever did on my Blackberry. This is due largely to the fantastic job the software does at figuring out what you actually intended to type. The correction system on the iPhone beats any other correction system I have ever used – it’s almost scary good. However, there are two typing problems I seem to have frequently. One is missing the ‘Space bar’ on the bottom of the screen and hitting one of the keys above it instead. The other is hitting the backspace key when I mean to type an ‘M’. When either of those typos happen, the auto correction fails as well since words are either mundged together with a bogus letter instead of a space, or are missing a couple of letters entirely. I would love to have a slightly different click sound for those keys so I could tell without looking that I didn’t type what I thought I did. The other thing I’ve found is that if I start typing very quickly, the iPhone keypad can pause for a second as it catches up – nothing big, but enough to throw me off my typing rhythm. All that said – I am more productive typing now than I was on my Blackberry.
Battery Life: I didn’t have any issues with battery life when I first started using the phone, and I still don’t – as long as I use it as a smart phone and not a mini laptop. What I’ve found is that the interface on the iPhone is so good that I end up doing a lot more work on it than I did on my Blackberry. I’ll browse the web more frequently, and actually work with online applications. I’ll also spend more time with email – both reading them, following links, open atachments, and, of course, writing them. Wrap all that together with my multiple daily SMS sessions, conference calls (love that feature!) and music/video playback, and the battery is challenged to last a day. As good as it may be at playing the role of “MacBook Nano”, I would show some restraint in using the iPhone this way if there is no recharging option available to top it off during the day.
If anything, the iPhone is just a bit “too sexy” for its battery…
Searching: More accurately said, this would be the inability to search. As I have more stuff stored on the iPhone, I’m starting to miss having the ability to search for things – especially emails. Here is a typical case for me: I needed to find a message from a particular person on some followup items from a meeting we had two weeks previously. To do that, I needed to scroll back the two weeks of messages (probably over 400 emails), then scan every email over a three day period to find it. That’s way too much finger flicking! I would love, at a bare minimum, to have a way to see every email from a particular individual. Having some text searching – even just for headlines – would be useful as well.
Stability: I have had only one hang since using the iPhone, and it resolved itself with a reboot. No clue why it happened and I can’t reproduce it. Outside of that, the device has given me no problems.
Syncing: What has been problematic for me is syncing. I am on a Mac using Microsoft’s Entourage as my main email/contact application. The iPhone sync’s to Entourage in a Rube Goldberg kind of way. Entourage syncs itself with Apple’s iCal and Address Book applications, and then the iPhone syncs with them. And visa-versa for changes on the iPhone. I have had issues where a meeting I see in Entourage hasn’t yet made it to iCal and therefore doesn’t make it to the iPhone on that sync – even though I think I have it there. It also seems to get some meetings in there twice. I also find that on occasion, syncing can just start but never complete. It doesn’t hang the iPhone, but just keeps trying to sync with it. None of these are critical issues, but they can be annoying. I am hopeful that we’ll see a lot more focus from Apple on this part of the software.
With a month of iPhone use under my belt, I am still glad I made the switch. No Regrets. Though some of the iPhone’s shortcomings are more obvious to me now, the incredible interface and intuitive accessibility of all of the functionality in the device continues to be compelling. It is one of the best ‘first cuts’ I have ever seen is a software based product.
And it should only get better from here…
NOTE: The first software update for the iPhone came out yesterday, and I installed it last night. If it makes a difference with any of the issues I discussed here, or if I find something new and incredible burried in it, I’ll let you know.