There are plenty of reviews and opinions out on the phone, so I'll go over mine fairly quickly and then get to discussing it from a small data problem perspective. My previous phone was a Cingular 8125, so I'll be comparing it to that.
Overall Impression
Not perfect, but quite nice. The strengths are that Apple decided to make the device do a small number of things and it does them very well. Easy to use and intuitive.
Pros:
- It serves as a great iPod.
- There are a lot of subtle things in the UI that work well. For example, when I'm talking on the phone, it detects when I move the phone so that it turns on or turns off the display appropriately. When I have bluetooth available, I can switch it off for individual phone calls. There was obviosuly a lot more user centered work that went into the UI design than went into my 8125.
- Finally someone got the cell phone browser paradigm right. Rather than trying to interpret a web page for a small screen, it just displays the whole page like it would be on a desktop, but makes it too small to see. Then you zoom in and out as appropriate.
- Using WiFi was surprisingly easy. The last two phones I've had WiFi cards in them, but I could never get them to work properly with my home network or with hotels' wireless when I travel. But the iPhone would discover publicly advertised networks, ask me if I want to connect, and ask for the password if one was required.
- The Edge network. I know that it is annoying slow, but it is really good enough for most browsing and if, as they say, the faster network cards are going to consume more power, I'd rather have something that is a little slower, but usable.
Cons:
- The battery life is good enough for reasonably heavy use (web surfing, email, watching videos) for one day, but for no longer than that. I could go for about two days of heavy use with my 8125. On the other hand, I couldn't watch videos on the phone and the resolution of the screen wasn't near as nice.
- Yes, the keyboard is usable after you've practiced for a while, but no where near as good as my blackberry or my 8125.
- No next/previous song switch on the side. If I'm listening to the iPod and want to skip or repeat the current song, I have to take it out of its case, unlock it, and hit next. I ought to be able to do that more easily.
SmallDataProblem Perspective
The iPhone helps with the following small data problem issues:
- Email -
Pros: The iPhone does a good job of synchronizing with Yahoo and as an imap client through an exchange server (I didn't really try the google integration). I was particularly impressed with how it kept the folders synchronized.
Cons: The downside is that you can't choose different "from" addresses in the Yahoo email client like you can on the web browser version. That's a significant problem if you are having a bunch of forwarded email addresses going to a single yahoo account. - Address Book -
Pros - Although it does not synchronize directly with an exchange server (like the 8125 does), you can synchronize it with outlook, so you can effectively accomplish something similar.
Cons - Synchronizing directly with exchange was really pretty nice on the 8125 and I miss it. - Voicemail - There has been a lot written about this and it's all true. Dealing with voicemail like you would deal with email messages is the way it should be.
- Managing Music and Podcasts -
Pros: My 8125 would, in principle, synchronize with Windows Media player. But the user interface on the Windows side is so convoluted, that it was not clear what was going on or how to get things synchronized properly. iTunes makes all this very easy. It's probably a little less flexible than what I could do with the 8125, but because it is so much easier, who cares?
Cons: Managing podcasts is a bit odd. iTunes has it's own settings for deciding what to keep and when to delete. The iPhone also has its own slightly different paradigm. Also, when you manually download podcast episodes, it seems to override the general policies you set. As a result, I'm never exactly sure what is going to happen to the podcasts when I sync. Also, you can only establish one set of download/delete policies for all podcasts. I'd rather set policies on a per-podcast basis. So it would keep the onion videos indefinitely (or only until I delete them manually), but only keep the most recent evening news video download whether I had watched it or not.
One other note - there is a tradeoff between how powerful and flexible a device is and how easy it is to use. Good UI designers know how to pack a lot of both into a single system. Even though the iPhone is really a small computer (you can even set up an SSH server on it and log into it), Apple decided to hide some of that flexibility in exchange for ease of use. The 8125 did not do that. It was a little harder to use, but 3rd party applications and an open API made it more of a computer in practice.
