We’ve heard what the Mossbergs, Levys, and Pogues (no, not the band) of the world have to say, but who else has gotten their hands on a brand new iPhone?
Edward Baig of USA Today, for one. The tech columnist gives an extensive review of the device and, like the other critics mentioned above, deems it mostly worthy of the hype, scoring it 3.5 out of 4.
What does he like? The virtual keyboard, which he calls “fun (once you get the hang of it),” the integrated Wi-Fi, the iPod features, and visual voicemail. Baig was less enamored with EDGE coverage, the lack of a removable battery, and other missing features like Flash, GPS, voice dialing, and the ability to use your own music as ringtones (I foresee leaving my iPhone on vibrate…).
There are a few things in Baig’s review that we haven’t necessarily heard elsewhere. For example:
Lots of people (me included) eschew iPod earbuds in favor of their own headphones. Now the bad news: They may not work. Because of how the connector is designed on the Shure headphones I use, I could not fit them into the iPhone headphone jack. Shure is readying a $40 accessory that would let you plug in its headphones and use them for voice. Though iPhone has Bluetooth capabilities for connecting to hands-free headphones, it does not support wireless Bluetooth stereo. I successfully used iPhone with the Jawbone Bluetooth headset from Aliph.As someone who’s always had trouble using Apple’s own earbuds (they simply don’t fit in my ears correctly), this is worrying news. And the lack of A2DP support (wireless Bluetooth stereo) is perplexing to me. Perhaps Apple will implement it later, via software update.
At least one reader has already asked about a comment Baig makes vis-a-vis corporate email. Here’s what he says:
Alas, I was unable to test my USA TODAY e-mail with iPhone because our company tech department raised questions about the security settings Apple required with our Microsoft Exchange servers. Apple insists corporate e-mail through the phone is safe. But because the product is so new, many businesses remain cautious. If receiving corporate e-mail is important, check with your tech department first.We know that the iPhone doesn’t support Exchange servers but, from what I’ve heard, Exchange does support IMAP, which the iPhone handles fine. This could simply be a recalcitrant IT department, unwilling to enable IMAP support, or it may be possible that the iPhone doesn’t support secure IMAP. We’ll see what we can find out.
I find it hard to believe the iPhone doesn't support secure IMAP, I find it very easy to believe that the IT department has no idea about the relative security of secure IMAP compared to Exchange. It's SSL, the same technology we use for credit card transactions. If that isn't good enough for email, we are all in a lot of trouble.
We went through this at work. There are a large number of Linux users and Outlook haters. IT tried to come back with the security argument (the standard IT rebuff). Being engineers, we quickly disabused them of the notion it was any less secure than Exchange. The brilliant part is that after they turned it on, they have more than once turned off the SSL security! And people wonder why we harangue IT so much.
So, what's going to happen is because lazy IT departments are not willing to allow people to use IMAP, users will one-up them.
Set up a rule in Outlook to automatically forward all new email received to your new Yahoo PUSH mail account. Set the iPhone email program to use your work address as "reply to".
This is not that hard a problem to get around, for those who are forced to suffer with Outlook on a PC.
Which is what makes it more amusing. That IT, in trying to be "secure", will push users toward solving the problem on their own, by a method as I expressed above, which may end up being even less secure.
No its becaue if you loose your lovley iphone and some freak gets hold of it. we can remotley blow it to bits like we can with our blackberry remote kill command. its a security risk to have many devices wandering around grabbing email and not being able to blast the fuk out of them. thats why we dont want them on our network. espically if your a publis company