reflections on one year of iPhone

After being goaded by my big boss, I bought my iPhone on launch day (and without queuing up for it, thankyouverymuch). Before that, I'd had some annoying flip phone and, separately, a Palm of some flavour that I've now forgotten. Although my phone had various features, it served exactly one function: it made and received calls. Any entries in its address book were ones that I manually entered because they were ones that I called frequently from my cell -- maybe a total of 20 entries in there. If I needed another phone number, I had to look it up in my Palm or my computer. I never took pictures on my phone because I couldn't figure out how to get them off of the phone, and I never synced my phone with anything for the same reason.

My iPhone has completely changed what I expect out of a phone. I'm back to texting (I had been a heavy texter while living overseas, but that stopped when I returned to the States both because it was difficult and not a lot of other people could send/receive texts). Browsing websites on my phone has become a part of my daily life (and makes hanging out in airports that much better), whereas I only tried to use the browser on my old flip phone once or twice before giving up on the agony. My iPhone has my whole Exchange address book in it, which means that there's currently ~1000 entries in there. It also has my Exchange calendar, which means that I always know where I'm going (for once in my life!). Looking over my wireless statements, even my voice use has roughly doubled (which I'm sure makes AT&T rather happy).

I've got iPhone complaints, don't get me wrong. But overall, I'm immensely pleased with what I got for my original $600. It was worth every penny.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2008
  Hi Nadyne, Great! The iPhone is a nice piece of kit! Looking at your list of improvements though, I notice that you can get all of them with a "decent" Windows Mobile phone, say an HTC Touch. [Granted: Maybe the web-browsing isn't quite as nice...] How much difference has the Apple-style UI made to you, do you think? What should HTC/Microsoft learn from the iPhone? I'd be interested to hear. Best wishes, Gavin  

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2008
  Things are better than wince 1.0 :-) Take a look at the HTC youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/HTC The forthcoming Touch Diamond looks quite nice - in fact you wouldn't believe it's a windows phone from first appearances :-) Gavin