My Review of the iPhone

I'm a late early adopter often... I like to see what other people think of things before getting the first version, or I hop on for the second version rather than wasting money on something brand new. I wasn't planning on buying an iPhone on the first round after I heard they didn't have keyboards, but when I first heard about the concept - an Apple phone-pda-ipod combo, I was all over it.

Fast forward to last week when my Treo 650 suffered from a severe stroke and I was forced to decide whether to get another refurbed version, get a new one, or try the iPhone including switching from Sprint to AT&T, whose customer service I never liked. Once I used an iPhone of a friend's, however, I was sold. I haven't read a lot about what other people think about their iPhones because honestly I haven't had the time, but I have heard the buzz. In any case, this is my report.

Here's what I like:
1) The resolution is awesome - being able to view photos and videos on such a great small screen is major.
2) Being able to check email with a real email reader that looks nice and being able to send email from that program is also major for me.
3) Auto-syncing with iPhoto, iTunes, iCal, Mail and Safari is nice. Very nice.
4) It's about time they put a speaker on an igadget... It's great to play songs or video when you don't have a headset handy. Better quality than I would've expected as well.

Here's what I don't like:
a) Apple doesn't have a really good task manager. I was hoping iCal would have been upgraded by now to include a better system for managing daily todos and lits, but it hasn't. So I'm going to have to hack together some sort of new system, after I had just gotten used to the one on the Palm. This is a major negative in my book.
b) The camera UI is a little weird and a little slow.
c) In general, I'd like more preferences, and I'm not a fan of the preferences within preferences and multi-levels when editing contacts - it screams of Windoze to me. Ick.
d) The absense fo a cut-and-paste feature bothers me. I'd like to be able to copy a phone number from a web site and paste it into contacts, for example.
e) I'm sure everyone feels this after having iPods that hold 40 Gigs and more - I want more space for data! I'm sure that will be provided in the next generation(s) but it's amazing how quickly you can use up 8 Gigs.

Overall, I'm pleased. I wish more software companies worked better together in general in terms of data transfer - all of my contacts from Palm have been mangled so I have to manually clean-up all of my data which takes a lot of time. Calendar entries came across ok, but not contacts. And again, my todos are lost in limbo-land until I come up with a solution that works Excel. We'll see how that goes.