iPhone by Steve

First, a little about myself. I’m 50 years old and have been around computers since my college days back in the late 70’s. That was my computer stone age. In my college computer programming classes, there were no video screens, no laptops, no small computers of any kind. We typed our programs on punch cards, a laborious process to be sure. In my COBOL programming class, my lab partner slaved day and night to type about a thousand cards for an inventory control program we were assigned. Her stack of cards was about twice what the rest of us needed to get the job done, which says something about her strange and twisted thinking, I guess.

The process meant that to run the program, the cards had to be placed in a card reader. In our computer lab, we had one such device in a central location that we all had to share. Believe me, when the rest of us saw my labby heading for the card reader, we fought tooth and nail to get ahead of her–no one wanted to languish in line while a thousand cards chattered their way through the machine. And here’s the funny part: My partner took her cards to the reader, and they all went through, but nothing happened. No fancy printout with her program results, no nothing. Turns out she had indented her cards ten spaces instead of the required seven. Her only recourse? To type each and every one of her cards all over again. Anyway, that was my introduction to computers. To say that we’ve come a long way is just a bit of an understatement.

I’m not an I.T. guy, but in my circles, I’m the guy that people come to when they need their computer problems solved. And usually, they ask me about their cell phones, too. Recently I’ve had two Treos, a 650 Palm OS version and also the Treo 700wx, which runs Windows Mobile 5. My wife has the Sprint Mogul from HTC, which uses Windows Mobile 6.0. There are good things and bad things about every one of them.

When I had the Palm, I loved the zippy (if somewhat cartoonish) interface for its sheer simplicity. It was an easy phone to use, but I didn’t like the “stripped down” way that web pages were rendered. And, I had a tough time getting my Gmail account to work properly. That took a considerable amount of tinkering with Java, as I’m sure many Gmail users can attest. I had heard that the Palm operating system would no longer be updated. I wanted something more.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how you look at things), I dropped the 650 one day and had to visit the Sprint store to invoke my insurance policy. The 650 was no longer available, so I took home a Windows phone, the Treo 700wx. For me, this was not a daunting transition, since I had owned several Pocket PC’s, all running Windows Mobile. In some ways, I felt like I had reunited with an old friend.

Windows Mobile has a lot going for it: Like the Palm, syncing with Microsoft Outlook on my work PC was pretty easy using Activesync. And I liked the ability to carry work documents and spreadsheets and view them natively without the third-party programs I had needed with the Palm. Still, there was something missing—the experience was not yet whole. For one thing, syncing the phone, while easy, was problematic. I would be in a meeting and all of a sudden an unexpected alarm would sound. I would adjust the settings on the phone to prevent this, but as soon as I used Activesync again, the problem would reappear—wierd and unsolvable for me. Settings had a way of becoming “unset,” which was just plain annoying. Moreover, like the Palm, the Internet experience left a lot to be desired. It wasn’t much better than the Palm, frankly, and I tried mightily to improve it, using third-party browsers such as Opera Mini. Though Opera worked better than the built-in Internet Explorer, I still wasn’t satisfied. My Gmail problem carried forward as well. Without Java on the phone, getting it to work, while doable, was tedious.

I decided I needed to change. I needed a device that could provide easy, uncomplicated operation in several areas:

• Email that just worked. In my case, a better Gmail experience on my mobile phone.
• Better Internet browsing that felt more like the experience using a PC or my MacBook Pro.
• Easy syncing that didn’t cause problems like I experienced with Windows Mobile.
• Good calendar functions (which in fact were just fine on Windows Mobile, so I guess I just wanted a calendar that worked just as well).
• I wanted to untether myself from Microsoft Outlook. That, actually, can be done with a Windows Mobile phone, but I was curious to see if a better Internet browser could make it even easier for me.
• Although both Treos that I owned were capable of playing songs and could theoretically play video as well, I found it pretty difficult to play movies and actually just gave up. I travel a lot, and, while not essential, I thought that having a hassle-free way to watch movies might be nice.

My requirements made my mobile phone buying decision pretty easy. Since a better Internet experience seemed to be the cornerstone of my needs, there seemed to be only one place to turn, to Apple, of course, and the iPhone.