PDA ever">iPhone Review: the best office PDA ever

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

Many people have jumped both onto and off of the iPhone release wagon. First it was touted as the next-big-thing, a mind blow­ing, life chan­ging and styl­ish entry into the phone mar­ket. Bring­ing with it some amaz­ing con­nectiv­ity apps and the Apple pledge “that if you used this phone then you were offi­cially cool” Even the price wasn’t put­ting too many people off. Then, with cam­eras ready and mikes checked, the UK media cir­cus des­cen­ded onto Lon­don to catch a glimpse of the “thou­sands” que­ing for this won­der device.

In the end they had to take pho­tos of them­selves. The ‘launch of the cen­tury’ fell over its own booster rock­ets and very strange phe­nomenon happened;

It seems that every­one stayed home.

What was wrong with the launch and, by proxy, the device is some­thing the pun­dits have spec­u­lated about end­lessly since then. Even those who were unabashedly pos­it­ive about the iPhone before release, such as Stuff Magazine, sat around on their asses. In fact, on the launch night pod­cast, they came up with all sorts of reas­ons why they were going to tuck in early and give it a miss.

The real reason, the pun­dits agreed, was that the iPhone had lost its cool tag. Some­thing Apple paid mil­lions of pounds to setup, lost in a single release. Or maybe the punters had come to their senses; after all, “surely it was just a phone?”

I listened in care­fully to Stuff’s pod­cast and read many blog reviews before pur­chas­ing my phone online at the Apple web­site. Most pun­dits had whined about the lack of 3G or men­tioned hanging on for a new ver­sion that was to come out 2008 and some­how solve all the ‘prob­lems’ with the device. At the moment it was pro­claimed to be a “compromise”.

Com­prom­ise!?

Per­haps if us mere mor­tals lived in the magazine world of super-high-tech, where the ste­reos cost £2000, the gad­gets are all reviewer only pre­views or free­bees and the nearest next gen con­sole was a joy pad away;

“Oh the Wii, yeah, [picks up wiimote] well it’s just not got the HD of the Sony has it [picks up the PS3 con­trol­ler] “ [deep sigh] “Yeah, but then the largest col­lec­tion of games are on the 360, just look at my gamer tag…[reaches for Xbox]”

I don’t live in that world. My ste­reo is a £43 T-Amp com­bined with 2 speak­ers from the bar­gain bucket at Richer Sounds. My last con­sole pur­chase was a Game­boy Advanced, I haven’t even played a PS3 and if I want to play an Xbox 360 I have to take a 20 minute drive over to my broth­ers flat and kick him out of bed.

In other words, I am a fairly nor­mal guy. I have a PC and I have a web­site, but essen­tially I am pay­ing for this with my own money and liv­ing with it. For 18 months.

To be sure PDA’s com­bined with phones are noth­ing new, even to me. I have been using these so called ‘smart phones’ for a few years now. The best of which was the bril­liant Nokia 9500 (which I have for sale if you are inter­ested) the only prob­lem with which was, put simply, that it was only slightly big­ger than the Death­star*. Oth­ers, like the N73, were more phone than smart and really didn’t offer me anything.

Even­tu­ally I went for a PDA for busi­ness. I run a depart­ment for a bank and I needed a sys­tem that could be used as a minor note taker, con­nect to our email, man­age my meet­ings and not be a hassle to use. I also need to be able to access doc­u­ments and pull up pdf’s in meet­ings where we have no WIFI or net­work ability.

I got so fed up with elec­tronic meth­ods that I even used a Hip­ster PDA for 6 months!

To say that I had used PDA’s “for pleas­ure” would have been an out­right lie. Hon­estly I can only say that I have “tried” to use PDA’s for pleas­ure, but that the PDA itself has always suc­ceeded to thwart me some­where along the way. My first PDA was a Psion 1 given to me by my father at the age of 10, some­thing akin to a Hitch­hikers Guide that was so heavy you could beat whales to death with it (not to men­tion a non-qwerty keypad). My second was a Psion 3a that I used to write upon when work­ing for Tempo. I then also tried the Sony range includ­ing the Clie and the P800. All of these had prob­lems that pre­ven­ted them from being “fun” and the most I could get out of them was emu­lat­ing Mon­key Island using the SCUMM emu software.

Finally I bought the HP Com­mu­nic­ator. The HP was my first attempt to replace a ded­ic­ated PDA with a true PDA-phone. It was a disaster.

I tried to like HPs, but they all suck ser­i­ous ass. My net­work admin­is­trator col­league now openly cries when he hears yet another sup­port call incom­ing from our MD, who has a par­tic­u­larly bad model. He is con­stantly get­ting it fixed/replaced.

So can Apple please a man who has been around the houses on this issue? People who read my stuff will know that I don’t have much truck with Apple’s iPod advert­ising, which I think is aimed philo­soph­ic­ally in the wrong dir­ec­tion. I have never owned a Mac, but my wife has had 3 in the time I have known her.

The issues that I wanted the iPhone to solve were as follows:

1. Car­ry­ing mul­tiple devices. I was start­ing to feel more machine than man. Twis­ted up in cables and get­ting evil in frus­tra­tion and the risk off los­ing things that cost a lot and go beep. A phone, a PDA, an mp3 player, a note­pad, a pen, a laptop and a good book. Could I do all that with one device?
2. I was also get­ting narked by hav­ing to con­vert my music before I could copy it to selec­ted device. Extremely narked. My mp3 player was not Aud­ible com­pat­ible and thus I had to burn books to CD before re record­ing them back into the PC as MP3’s. A ser­i­ous pain in the ass.
3. Inter­net access. Sure my Nokia N73 claimed to have inter­net, but it didn’t really. Not inter­net like we are using now.

So does the pur­chase of the iPhone make up for all that? We all know the basic fea­tures of the iPhone: the inter­net and the rota­tion of the image when turn­ing the screen.

The Basic fea­tures list:

Calls, SMS, Voice­mail, Pho­tos, Ring­tones, Music, Video, Wi-Fi Store, Safari, Mail, Maps, Wid­gets, You­Tube, Multi-touch, OS X, Wire­less, Accel­er­o­meter, Prox­im­ity Sensor

But, what is it actu­ally like to live and work with? What are its good and bad points? What about the little things you don’t hear about in most reviews? The little peccadilloes?

The inter­face has been writ­ten about end­lessly and indeed it is the unit’s main selling point. You really have to use it see how suave it is. If any­thing on the iPhone will go down as a design clas­sic it will be the inter­face. Com­par­ing it to the HP Communicator’s inter­face of MS Win­dows is like com­par­ing a stick with a cruise mis­sile. Mov­ing between menus is classy. The amount of but­tons have been pared down to an abso­lute min­imum and while you will find your­self get­ting tired of the ges­tures (a simple click is always bet­ter) you will enjoy using it 90% of the time.

Once suf­fi­ciently trained and prac­ticed you will nav­ig­ate the iPhone aston­ish­ingly swiftly, much quicker than a novice. So, when you show it to someone there is a slight moment of dis­ap­point­ment. The inter­face hides the cor­rect ges­ture, expect­ing you to know it and your super-proficient-demonstration, pinch­ing and twist­ing the unit like you are doing jujutsu on a roof tile, will be hard for the new­bie to rep­lic­ate straight off the bat.

The phone is designed to be used by the per­son hold­ing it. Not by any­one else. This neces­sit­ates con­stantly hand­ing back and forth when demo­ing it or the touch screen fails to work correctly.

In three weeks I have had to reset the iPhone twice. Both times when tak­ing off the cradle. This is prob­ably a small bug in iTunes. Twice may sound like a lot but actu­ally it is amaz­ing for a PDA phone. My HP needed reset­ting every single time I looked at it.

iPod func­tions are exactly as expec­ted; per­fect. The sys­tem syncs with iTunes and the soft­ware is another smooth exper­i­ence. In use the power but­ton works as a hold but­ton for when the unit is in your pocket. How­ever, there is no inline remote yet. In order to stop the music you need to take out the iPhone, turn it on, slide the lock and then press pause. This is a slow pro­cess. Quicker is to simply yank out the head­phones from the socket which stops the track where you are. One fea­ture is that the pos­i­tion of the cur­rent track car­ries across to the PC. So, if you are half way through a pod­cast on your PC the iPhone will con­tinue from that point. Exceed­ingly cool. The touch con­trols are OK, but mov­ing through the track using the time slider is not as gran­u­lar as I would have liked.

The cam­era is much much bet­ter than the 2mp sug­gests. How­ever, there is not much more here than a plain cam­era; no video or night mode, no zoom or attempt to rep­lic­ate any great function.

Here are some images I took on a trip to Kew Gar­dens (click for full size):

Sim­pli­city is this devices byword in the Getting-Things-Done sense. Where a func­tion isn’t neces­sary it has been left out. For some that will be a deal breaker. For me it is a God-send. I am so fed up of the brand­ing powers that be prom­ising a func­tion that in the end is miss­ing or doesn’t work prop­erly. Too many gad­gets prom­ise and don’t deliver. GPS on the Nokia N95 is a recent example.

There is no cut and paste or applic­a­tion switch­ing bey­ond hav­ing the iPod in the back­ground. So, you write a note don’t expect to be able to cut it into a SMS. In fact the SMS app is strangely miss­ing many fea­tures. Per­haps this is a USA thing but for us Eng­lish, the lack of being able to send SMS’s to mul­tiple recip­i­ents is bloody annoy­ing. It annoyed me straight away as I couldn’t text all my con­tacts my new num­ber and had to use my old phone! You can’t for­ward SMSs either.

On the other hand, SMSs are now threaded. In other words they are exactly alike the Mac chat­ting app (which this is obvi­ously a rela­tion of). I simply pick the per­son and bingo I have all the com­mu­nic­a­tions we have sent to each other in the form of a simple con­ver­sa­tion. I like this fea­ture a lot and it saves me con­sid­er­able time. I just wish that I could chose whether to use it or not. This is a pro­gram­ming thing. Apple can fix this. Apple needs to fix this.

Using the unit whilst lay­ing down is not easy as the unit thinks you are tilt­ing it and may rotate the screen.

Inter­net on the device is REAL inter­net and is glor­i­ous. The large screen makes all the dif­fer­ence and the slick zoom func­tion is easy and simple to use. The only thing miss­ing is Flash, so You­Tube won’t work out­side the built in app.

The alarm app again over­uses the touch inter­face by hav­ing a rolling timer. It is fun, but not super quick.

The Googlemaps app is amaz­ing. I loved it. It is for me the killer app on the iPhone. While it isn’t a GPS, it is very quick. You can zoom in, plot a course and add book­marks. Never get lost again! never have to find the map in the car! Applic­a­tions just don’t get any bet­ter than this.

Phone qual­ity is very good, and I have had no prob­lems at all with calls, tak­ing calls, or ringing. Clar­ity is also very good and the screen turns itself off when held up to your ear. Recep­tion is sim­il­arly bet­ter than other PDA-Phones, being one step down from per­fect. I don’t have any prob­lems con­nect­ing or recon­nect­ing after train tun­nels etc.

One thing that must be men­tioned is online applic­a­tions. Any­thing web based can be built to work in an integ­rated way with the iPhone. This means that they become as easy as built in apps. This is remark­ably clever. Google has just added this func­tion­al­ity to Gmail and Face­book also has it.

The onscreen key­board is smart in help­ing those of use with big hands in work­ing out what we meant to type rather than what we actu­ally did. The applic­a­tion is well designed but the method of mov­ing the cursor pos­i­tion is not as easy as it could have been. There are no arrow-keys and you move the cursor by press­ing and hold­ing down on the screen and then mov­ing the pointer via a little magi­fy­ing lens that pops up. Neat but overkill?

Apple have taken so many of the phone spe­cific fea­tures we all take for gran­ted with Nokia, et al, off the machine. Such things as the SMS I men­tioned, but also depth of con­fig­ur­a­tion. The setup menus are half the depth of the aver­age Nokia. I sus­pect this is because they ran up against the same soft­ware walls that Microsoft run up against and rather than bluff it out they simply stuck to what they knew worked well. After all the rest can be rolled out as an upgrade later. This adds to the air of sim­plicty the device exudes. A classy qual­ity that states that whatever you find on the phone will be well done.

This is my aver­age iPhone day,

1. I get awoken by the iPhone’s rather evil alarm at 6am. I roll the slider to select snooze.
2. 15 Minutes later, I get reawakened by the iPhone’s alarm. This is a really evil one that sounds like a revers­ing super­tanker. Like a sealion’s roar spoken through a robotic voice box.
3. I get up and do the usual morn­ing stuff people do.
4. When dressed I use the iPhone to check the weather using the spe­cial app. This takes 5 seconds and is very slick.
5. I check my cal­en­dar as the items due pop up a reminder. This applic­a­tion saved my ass today as a meet­ing had changed day and I didnt know.
6. On the way to work I listen to an Aud­ible book. Cur­rently I am listen­ing to “Stein: On Writ­ing”, which is excellent.
7. Near work I quick call Kieran or Jim to see if the team wants coffee.
8. In the the office, I then sync up my iPhone with my work laptop. I have screen pro­tector film sheet installed. This is the one vital access­ory I recom­mend to all.
9. The sync also charges the phone.
10. New pod­casts, Ask Ninja epis­odes and videos are down­loaded to the iPhone along with any updated PIM information.
11. Dur­ing the day I then carry the iPhone around with me as a short note taker and diary.
12. Today for example I checked an email in a meet­ing by con­nect­ing into my M$ Exchange POP server over EDGE. Speed over EDGE is fine. I have no com­plaints at all.
13. On the way home I use the iPhone as an iPod again, this time listen­ing to pod­casts or watch­ing a film. I like both Vir­gin­worlds and MOGarmy
14. I always call my wife on the way home.
15. At home and before bed I check my per­sonal email account (Gmail), now via my home WIFI, which is seam­less in trans­ition from EDGE. Speed over WIFI is amazing.
16. I head to bed and set the iPhone alarm.

That is an aver­age day. On a good iPhone day I may surf the net to look some­thing up, use Google maps to plot how to get to a meet­ing (my per­sonal killer app) or even write poetry.

Sure it doesn’t take the place of ‘real’ com­put­ing, but it is bloody bril­liant to be able to do all this without cost­ing the earth in usage charges.

The sheer smooth­ness of using the device, the access­ib­il­ity and the com­bin­a­tion of…

• Phone
• Mp3 player includ­ing audible
• Googlemaps
• Notes
• Email both work and play
• PIM
• Inter­net
• Films
• WIFI

…in a small sexy look­ing tab­let phone is bloody brilliant.

So, in con­clu­sion, and your mileage may vary, but for me the iPhone is a massive win and you should get one.  I have never had such a seam­lessly integ­rated sys­tem before, which is easy to use and very easy to live with. I love the device and com­bined with the excel­lent free usage rules on O2 means I am con­nec­ted in ways I have never been before.

I find that my per­sonal tech gear must be seam­lessly integ­rated and that I will  have no truck with bad design or any ‘clunk’.  I need the stress free exper­i­ence not the beta release.  The iPhone is the most stress free device I have ever owned and that alone is worth the money.

It scores a straight 10. Sure there are a few items that take get­ting used to, but all in all it is a mar­velous device.

*Of course the Nokia 9500 isn’t as big as a Death­star, since there is no such thing as a Death­star. Per­haps a bet­ter com­par­ison would have been with the Crab Neb­ula, which is tiny in comparison.

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