Final Episode of "Will Tom Keep His New iPhone?"

Welcome to the final episode of the 30-day game show in the Goodman household: “Will Tom Keep His New iPhone.”

The contestant has decided to keep his iPhone, but he’s a reluctant customer who’s hoping the Palm Pre will be available for his office cell phone plan when his current 2-year contract with AT&T is up.

Tom decided to keep his beautiful toy because he felt he should put a toe in the new waters of mobile internet browsing and web apps. His Palm Treo is a superior business tool to his iPhone in several ways, but Tom knows nothing presently on the market that can compete with the iPhone when it comes to internet applications and web browsing.

Tom remains a reluctant iPhone owner, however, for the following reasons:

First, there’s no cut-and-paste. The other day, his son texted him asking for a relative’s phone number. Tom went to his Contacts program, found the 10-digit number, wrote the dang thing on his hand so he’d be able to remember it after punching back through all the steps to return to the texting program. On any smartphone other than the iPhone, Tom could have simply highlight the desired information from one application, copied it, and then pasted it into another application. The fact that the iPhone cannot perform this function is one of several signs that it was not built to be a productivity device. It is, fundamentally, a beautiful iPod that can place phone calls.

Second, there’s no native ability to sync Outlook Notes and Tasks with the iPhone. The iPhone has a Notes feature (cue the laugh track), but it’s not tied to Outlook like the Contacts and Calendar features. And the Notes you create on iPhone can’t be accessed or edited on a desktop PC or Mac. Tom has always used the Notes and Tasks features of Outlook and his Palm products for Getting Things Done. On Day One of his iPhone, Tom was flabbergasted to discover that his new toy pulled in his Outlook Contacts and Outlook Calendar but the boys at Apple decided he didn’t need his Outlook Tasks or Notes. For any other iPhone customers stuck with the same problem to solve, Tom recommends the independent app, iMExchange, for $10. It’s not perfect (explained in the next post), but at present it’s the only way to sync both your Outlook Tasks and Notes through your Exchange server.

Third, while Tom’s iPhone pulled in his Outlook Contacts, his iPhone failed to sync his distribution lists created in Outlook Contacts. So, if Tom wants to send an email from his iPhone to his entire staff (one of his many distribution lists), he has to enter each name individually…or just wait til he’s sitting at his computer.

Fourth, Tom knows he cannot replace the iPhone battery himself when the time comes. That thin, seemingly seamless body on iPods and iPhones come at a price: Tom has already had the experience of returning an iPod to Apple so they could replace the inaccessible battery once it no longer held a charge. The process was painless, but of course Tom depends on his phone more than his music player. Within the next two years when his iPhone gets to the point where it no longer holds a charge and he has to mail it in to Apple for them to install a new battery, he will be without a phone for a week. Yet another reason Tom cannot regard the iPhone as a business productivity device.

Fifth, Tom finds something as simple as “date picking” in most iPhone apps annoyingly more complicated than it needs to be. For those of you who haven’t used an iPhone, the iPhone date-and-time chooser is done by this image of spinning reels like a Vegas slot machine--like you would expect of a pretty toy, come to think of it. This means you have to scroll, scroll, scroll until the dial lands on the right month or date or hour that you’re picking. *Sigh*

For these reasons, Tom is a reluctant iPhone owner who will likely move to the anticipated Palm Pre as soon as he can. Wired, Engaget and Newsweek explain why techies are drooling over the Pre and it’s not even available yet. You can do some drooling yourself over images of Palm’s resurrection device from Gizmodo or MobileCrunch.

Instead of Apple’s threat to sue Palm for supposedly ripping off their multitouch screen Apple should do a little ripping off from the Palm and imitate some of the features that has made Palm the once (and future?) king of business devices.