The iPhone User Review Contd

Ever since we bought the iPhone for S, I always found myself reaching for it to play with. This annoyed S no end, especially with me taking the phone into the bathroom to catch up on my emails in the morning. If there is one thing that the iPhone has changed in my lifestyle, it has been the ability to check email first thing in the morning. It helps me prioritise what to start with as soon as I reach my desk, rather than doing the prioritisation on the desk. Sometimes, it works the other way too. Every now and then comes an email which puts me in a bad mood as soon as I read it. Perhaps, if I'd left it unchecked, I would have left home more cheerful!

Generally though, its a good thing to have, and it irritated me no end that the Orbit could not bring such brilliance into itself (although it was aged two). So, I was on the lookout for a phone which could do email. Blackberry was a first choice. I considered the Blackberry Storm for quite some time, but an initial putoff was that it had no wi-fi at all. You may argue that O2/Orange gives you a data option, but no sir, that is nowhere compared to wi-fi speeds. AppStore and YouTube would creak their way to render what would be a snap-of-a-finger job on wi-fi. Two, not having a wi-fi option at all is a no-deal in this time of free markets. The phone would be a brick once I am out of contract. Why would I pay for a data tariff once I'm out of contract, when I already pay for my wireless broadband. Three, network coverage is not all that great either. Imagine me at a friend's place or at the local Wetherspoons, and I find the coverage is bleak. Would I not want to switch over to the free, faster wifi? By the looks of it, Blackberry has fixed this grouse in Storm2 by adding wi-fi. Just this above line makes me wonder if all business is going Apple's way by not including basic things and hyping it up when they finally come on par subsequently.

The Blackberry packed in a lot of features - it did email great, had a great UI with its shiny linear icons, external upgradable memory, long lasting battery life, a camera with flash, and allowed me to re-use my old memory card with its drag-and-drop music. But there I was at O2 looking at both the Blackberry and the iPhone. With the sleek shiny iPhone morphing itself to the touch of my fingers, the Blackberry suddenly seemed very outdated (do I have to press buttons? BUTTONS??) Seriously though, what won me over to the iPhone was that the browsing experience in Blackberry reminded me of the Orbit, and the iPhone was miles ahead in its capability to render pages. And the looks, of course.

And so, about a year into S's iPhone, I got myself my own iPhone 3GS.

There are still a lot of things which I would like to have on the iPhone. Like longer battery life, for example. I barely manage a day, it stretches to a day and a half if I don't go to the gym. My Orbit gave me around two and a half days on a full charge, but then, truth be told, I did not use the Orbit as much as I use the iPhone. I'd like the ability to receive/read a business card (The gawky Sony Ericsson P990i did that!!). I would like the ability to forward or delete calendar items which have been pushed from my work email account. (Blackberry does this :( ). I would like the ability to save attachments into the phone. (This doesn't happen because Apple does not give you a Windows-ish file-system view). I would like the camera to zoom in and zoom out by the pinch gesture (Talk about wishful thinking). And so on!!