I got an iPhone in November 2007. I’ve nearly reached the end of my two year agreement. And it has been great. It was a little scary commiting to $70/mo. for that long but our budget could sustain it and the phone was paid for by a friend ($400 at the time). So we took the plunge.
I absolutely loved it!
The phone is not just a phone. As my good friend recently put it, “The iPhone is one of man’s great accomplishments.” I tell friends it is my mobile office. I hardly ever get out my laptop at home because I can do so much on my phone. I’m typing this article on my phone!
Speaking of which, the virtual keyboard really seals the deal. And this is where the G1 falls on it’s face. I can type fast on the iPhone. It’s painless. It corrects my mistakes. It predicts what I’m going to type. It learns odd spellings like my last name. It feels like an extension of my brain. The G1feels like An extension of my elbow – useful but not dextrous.
So why am I switching to a G1? Simple economics – work pays for it. At least I was going to switch. I’ve been using the G1 as my primary device for a month. Technically, I can do all the same things on it – email, call, txt, maps, etc. But it is painful – extremely painful. I suppose if I had never had an iPhone that I would think the G1 is great. But I have so I don’t.
Entourage on the iPhone
I have an iCal calendar on my laptop that I use to manage my personal life – home, volunteer service, etc. It works great to have the calendar on my phone and laptop, be able to edit, add and delete items in either place and have them update each other.
I also access my gmail account from Mail on my laptop and iPhone via IMAP. This works seamlessly. I send and receive emails from either location and they are always in sync with each other. It’s flawless.
With this functionality in place my iPhone fulfills the function of mobile office – allowing me to take calls, schedule meetings and access information wherever I am.
Since the iPhone OS 2.0 upgrade I’ve known that I could use my phone with my Exchange account at work. I set up the Exchange account to work with email earlier this week. I only set it up to work with email as a starting point. Once I was comfortable with that I would move on to calendars and/or contacts – that was my plan.
Email was working fine. It was a little tricky for me to figure out the right server/username settings (my Exchange account has always been a little quirky), but once that was done it just worked.
Yesterday, for the first time, I wished that I had my work calendar on my phone also. I brought up my settings and slid the calendar option from no to yes – immediately a dialogue warned me that all of my other calendar items would be deleted and asked if I wanted to proceed. “No. I want my personal calendar and my work calendar side by side.”, I thought. “Isn’t that possible?”
It turns out it is possible but not this way. If you turn on Exchange for your phone, forget having any other calendar sync to your phone. For some reason, iCal calendars and Exchange calendars cannot co-exist on the iPhone.
Actually they can but you have to pipe the calendar through iCal – and that require having Entourage installed. Fortunately, I do have Entourage installed. I turned on syncing in the Entourage preferences and the Entourage calendar appeared in iCal. Then I when I sync my phone the Entourage calendar is included. Even better, I can edit the Entourage items on my phone and then sync them back to iCal which automatically syncs back to Entourage which automatically syncs back to Exchange. It is not a seamless ‘push’ solution but I don’t really need that. This suits my occasional need to view my Exchange calendar on my phone. Hooray!
I just returned from the Apple store. My replacement iPhone had a bad battery. They replaced it as quickly as they had before. I am very fortunate and am grateful to a company that has taken such good care of this customer. I hope I am equally concientious of my customers.