Yeah, yeah. It’s cool. It’s slick. It’s sexy. It’s customizable. But when you get over all of the flash, it misses the mark in many ways, especially if you’re a business user.
First and foremost, ATT is hands down the worst mobile network available. ATT has numerous reception holes and is generally unreliable. Those are two key factors every business person requires with a phone. And its not just in my local area or remote areas – this problem persists in every major city I have traveled. This single fact alone should be enough for any business user to stick with the one-two punch of Blackberry+Verizon. For contrast, I used Verizon for several years and had excellent service and reliability.
Now for the phone itself.
One more jab to reliability – the battery life. I know this is a pain point for everyone, but it certainly hits home with the need of a business user. Road warriors (who are heavy users) can’t afford for their phone to die when they are reliant on it for staying in touch with the world.
The business user is going to lean towards the Exchange integration and overall productivity features of the iPhone. It’s quite easy to setup an Exchange account, but misses many simple features one might expect. For instance, you can’t forward meeting invites to others once you have deleted the initial email invitation. You can’t reply to meeting invites either. When your phone is out of signal range you can’t move or delete email messages.
Contact management is not very robust – I have nearly 2,000 contacts in my book and you can only scroll through the name list…no categories for easy finding.
I can’t schedule how my phone checks the email server…it’s either on or off. Though you can set an interval, it can’t be set differently for weekend vs weekday.
It would be great to add attachments to email messages too…either ones I create or forward.
Now some general features we all would enjoy.
How about a search function that searches the phone and the web.
Or a more reliable accelerometer that responds to turning the phone in landscape mode without the need to shake it or type sideways.
Oh yeah – the App Store search is abysmal. Search is weak, there is no sorting option and you can’t filter on much more than “free” or not.
And have you ever noticed that when you delete an App from your phone, you are prompted to rate it. I would imagine you are like me and would rate it pretty low – why else would you be deleting it? This might explain why most Apps in the store are hard pressed to get anything better than a 3-star rating.
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I’ve got big fingers. Well, big for a iPhone keypad. I couldn’t help but think back to my old Palm. Ahh, how that stylus made things faster. And loved the stylus/pen combo.