So I had the opportunity to try out the iPhone for a day. Overall I was impressed, but there were some very basic features missing from many of the otherwise killer apps that I would greatly miss if I was to use the iPhone as my primary PDA and phone. Here is a brief summary:<\/p>\n
| <\/td>\n | Pros<\/td>\n | Cons<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Browsing<\/td>\n | Beautiful.<\/td>\n | No copy and paste, so no convenient way to copy that phone number from a web page into the dialer. No support for flash or any other 3rd party extensions. No way to change the Google search default (that I could see). Slow over Edge — though much better over Wi-Fi. I found I like to browse faster than the rendering engine can keep up, resulting in waiting while the page that has already downloaded just draws to the screen.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Notes<\/td>\n | Convenient, good auto-correct feature does a lot to make up for the non-tactile interface<\/td>\n | No undo. And no select feature either. If you want to delete more than a few characters, you’ll hold down the delete key, end up deleting too much accidentally, and look for that missing Undo key, only to give up and accept data loss.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Email<\/td>\n | Nice to have a built-in app, especially when it connects to Gmail. Good to have IMAP support to make up for the poor “Gmail”-dedicated option.<\/td>\n | When I added Gmail, all emails came in as Unread. No bulk method to mark them as read either, so I would have had to open each of 47 messages to mark them as read. Also no conversation view of email as Gmail on the web has — just the archaic individual message listing.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Overall Stability<\/td>\n | The system was responsive most of the time.<\/td>\n | Sometimes the whole screen would just freeze for several seconds for no apparent reason. It would not respond to the one button I could press or any touch on the screen.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Google Maps<\/td>\n | Multi-touch makes this great.<\/td>\n | I actually have found Microsoft Live Maps to provide a more accurate freeway traffic condition (don’t know why), so I would prefer to have Live Maps offered.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Voicemail<\/td>\n | Of course I’m happy to see an app to visually make reviewing voicemails as easy as sifting an Inbox.<\/td>\n | No cons here — except that I rarely have more than a single voicemail message waiting for me anyway, so I wouldn’t call this a killer app.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| YouTube<\/td>\n | Entertaining<\/td>\n | Poor video quality — worse than a desktop computer it seemed. Slow downloads over the Edge data connection.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Weather<\/td>\n | Convenient one or two touch access to weather daily forecasts.<\/td>\n | Unlike the dynamic calendar button on the home screen, the weather button reports a static “sunny 73 degree” all day every day.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Camera<\/td>\n | High quality. Cute animated shutter.<\/td>\n | Issues pressing the “take picture” button not always taking the picture. It could cause you to miss the perfect moment for your picture.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Phone dialer<\/td>\n | Nice interface. <\/td>\n | I actually prefer the Windows Mobile Smartphone interface because it is more friendly to one-handed use.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Keyboard<\/td>\n | I personally really like the touchscreen keyboard, especially because it affords more room for the beautiful display. Auto-correct makes up where mistakes occur.<\/td>\n | Virtually impossible to use with just one hand. And yes, more mistakes are made than with a slide-out qwerty keyboard. <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n Then of course there’s the closed platform problem, and I miss the voice-activated search I have on my Windows Mobile Smartphone. <\/p>\n Bottom line<\/h4>\nMicrosoft employment aside (since I tend to not let that get in the way of my personal purchase decisions), would I get an iPhone if I had $500 and a two-year contract I cared to get into? I’m not sure. If I did it would be for the mobile browsing experience and nothing more. That’s not worth $500 plus a two-year contract. Check out a recent post I did on Windows Mobile Smartphones<\/a> for how I like to find inexpensive, very usable smartphones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I had the opportunity to try out the iPhone for a day. Overall I was impressed, but there were some very basic features missing from many of the otherwise killer apps that I would greatly miss if I was to use the iPhone as my primary PDA and phone. Here is a brief summary: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2685,"featured_media":37840,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4617,3917],"class_list":["post-36020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-permierdev","tag-andarno","tag-mobile-devices"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":" So I had the opportunity to try out the iPhone for a day. Overall I was impressed, but there were some very basic features missing from many of the otherwise killer apps that I would greatly miss if I was to use the iPhone as my primary PDA and phone. Here is a brief summary: […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2685"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |