How I became an iPhone convert

Some of you may remember a blog posting I made earlier this year in which I explained that I had a RIM BlackBerry, compared it to my colleagues’ iPhones, and found the iPhone lacking in a few key areas. Well, last week I made the switch to an iPhone, for what it’s worth, and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed.

I’d been a BlackBerry 8700 user (through Cingular, then AT&T) for more than a year before the switch. It was my first smartphone, and I was totally hooked. I’d gotten quite adept at typing on the QWERTY keyboard, and had the system set up to check multiple e-mail accounts, surf the Web, Twitter and IM with friends, family and colleagues. I admit that a fair amount of what I used it for was superfluous, but in reality it kept me very well connected with the office. I found the battery life superlative — I could go days without bothering to recharge it. The downside was that the BlackBerry was bulky and awkward to carry, and didn’t sport integration with Apple’s iSync software, requiring the use of third-party software for contact and calendar synchronization (in my case, I relied on Mark/Space’s Missing Sync).

I noted in that weblog that while my colleagues’ iPhone batteries had all run dead during the day we went to an all-day outdoor concert, my BlackBerry was alive and well by the end of the show.

Alas, my hubris must have affected my karma, because within a few weeks of that event, my BlackBerry started developing some problems — random freezing, locking up and other issues that no amount of hardware resetting or software resetting would cure.

AT&T volunteered to take the phone back and exchange it for a refurbished one, but advised me that I’d be charged, as the device was no longer under warranty. I’m only slightly more than a year into a two-year plan with them, so for me to break the contract and go with another carrier would induce the early termination fee of my contract; what’s more, I’ve been happy overall with AT&T, and see no reason to switch.

Faced with the prospect of having to pay full price for a replacement phone anyway, I decided to go with the iPhone. It only made sense, really. I recognized as soon as the iPhone was announced that it was inevitable that I’d get one eventually. I just hoped — in vain, as it turns out — that my BlackBerry might last long enough for me to see the next generation of the iPhone on store shelves before I had to take the plunge.

So to beat the “Black Friday” retail shopping rush that inevitably follows our Thanksgiving holiday each year, I went to my local AT&T store a week ago last Wednesday to pick up an iPhone. There’s no Apple retail store less than a 45 minute drive from here, so that was the closest spot I could go without resorting to Apple’s retail store online.

I got the phone home and within two or three minutes, had it set up, transferred my number and activated a call plan. Shortly thereafter, iTunes transferred all of my contacts and calendar information, along with a 3GB playlist of music I wanted to take with me on the go.

In short, the setup of the device was perfect — it could not have gone any smoother.

The iPhone’s use has been remarkably smooth, too. Having a phone that also uses Wi-Fi is a pleasant novelty, especially when I’m trying to retrieve HTML-based e-mail (something my BlackBerry couldn’t do) or surf a Web page. The iPhone’s multi-touch capability is intuitive and works great.

Typing on the on-screen keyboard has been a bit of an adjustment. I’m still using an index finger hunt-and-peck system instead of my more BlackBerryesque two-thumb touch typing method, and my speed is suffering for it. Along with my accuracy. But the iPhone’s predictive text capabilities are almost eerie, they’re so good, so my missives usually make sense.

I still have a complaint about battery life. The battery doesn’t last nearly as long as I’d like it to, so I have to keep it tethered my laptop when I’m not using it, to charge up the battery (easier that than finding yet another electrical outlet for the adorable little adapter Apple includes with the iPhone). I’ve also resorted to using it in “airplane mode” a few times when I’ve been on the road, to get some juice out of the ubiquitous iPod charger/FM transmitter products we’ve come to rely on in our vehicles.

Frankly, I think that the iPhone’s call reception quality, especially indoors, is poorer on my iPhone than it was on my BlackBerry. There have been at least a few occasions now where the iPhone’s displayed “no service” in locations that I know my BlackBerry found at least one bar of connectivity.

No, I haven’t “jailbroken” my iPhone, nor do I have any plans to do so — I’ll leave it to other editors at Macworld to perform that delicate bit of surgery on their systems. I’ll patiently await the arrival of legitimate third-party applications for the iPhone, which will hopefully follow not too long after Apple’s introduction of the long-promised iPhone Software Developers Kit (SDK). So for now I’m pining for real IM client and other some other stuff. Especially games.

The people who have begun to come out with iPhone games already (depending, once again, on having you jailbreak your phone) are coming out with some pretty nifty stuff, like a Nintendo Entertainment System console emulator and, more recently, a ScummVM emulator that lets you run classic LucasArts adventure games. I can’t wait to see what people will be able to do once they can get under the hood with real Apple development tools.

Category: Musings

Posted by Peter Cohen on Nov 27 2007, 2:14 PM ET

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