It's a bit scattered and not organized but I tried to think of everything.
No going “bump in night” my 6700 and 6800, would randomly come on. Very often while driving in the ProClip. This was annoying at night because it was distracting while driving. Very common when going in and out of roaming areas. Also happens over night while charging and often my screen is on in morning and I wake up at night for moment to see the ceiling glowing.
Volume control is where it’s supposed to be. Why on earth 6800 moved it off the side is beyond me.
I had been using 6800 for a couple weeks, I reactivated the 6700. The long stylus felt SO much better and more natural. I hate the
Mogul stubby stylus (I’d take a Stubby antenna back for a real stylus). In some respects the 6700 felt right putting it back in my hand with it’s long stylus on the top. Why did I buy that
Mogul again (that never seemed to go over the edge on memory)?
Ever go back to a 13” CRT at some school or friends house that doesn’t have the money you have for large LCD’s. Going back to
Mogul really felt archaic after just using the
iPhone a few days. The fonts are tiny, and jagged and the view very small on the 6700/6800. Where as they are so silky smooth you can’t even see the pixels. It’s like reading laser printed paper at 600 DPI on super white. I didn’t realize how bad 6700/6800 was until picked it up to hard reset it to return to Sprint.
You spend more time pecking, scrolling, resizing, rotating view than the
iPhone spends getting the data over the slower network. What’s nice too is partial pages are very usable. The PPC is often “locked up” until the page is done and often does a re-layout at the very end. Extremely frustrating to use.
I have put pictures on my 6700/6800 and it’s fun to pass photos around with friends at a restaurant or something. Pictures on the
iPhone are in a completely different league. As the photos switch to landscape and portrait you just rotate the phone to use every pixel.
I’m amazed the 6700 held up. The buttons, slider etc. were not exactly built to last 5 years. But it did last a year. But I know many heavy user the D pad died and some keys died. But I tended to avoid the weak spots. Where as it’s like getting into a Pontiac Sunfire with the 6700/6800 vs slipping into BMW 5 series with
iPhone. Buttons on the
iPhone are so nice. Firm low profile rubbery buttons. They won’t get accidentally pushed they are placed perfectly and there are very few.
It synced Contacts, Email and all your IE7 BookMarks. It handles notes on Contacts which heavily use. It doesn’t do Tasks though. I’ve had the same 3 Tasks on my list for the last year. I know some folks are more diligent than I and would miss that feature. I need to play with Calendar more there may be some clever tricks their.
The common belief is Apple will sell applications through iTunes. If they sell GPS Navigator software I’d buy in a heart beat. For now the retired 6700 will do that job. Apple would be crazy to not do this or allow a 3rd party to do it like TomTom. It’s running a variant of linux (OS X).
Some may like tweaking PPC’s, I really don’t. It’s gratifying to get something working and help your fellow convergent but I really could do without it.
The
iPhone not only has cool looking interfaces it has cool usage flows. For example ever make a call on your 6700/6800 and have it connect to the headset in the car in the garage and you listening to the phone and wondering why is it so quiet. Duh, hurry up and get that stylus out and dig into the menu to switch to handset. On the
iPhone you click call and it gracefully pops up 3 large buttons to choose Headset, Handset or Speaker. If you do nothing it will default to the headset. IT has just the right timing, it’s like it read your mind.
Another timing one is viewing pictures. You go into pictures and there is a frame with a couple controls on it. Leave it for a few seconds and blends into full frame. Double tap anywhere to zoom in, double tap to zoom out. Swipe your finger right to left you get the next picture. Swipe the other way to go back. I have not figured out if there is gesture to get the frame controls back.
Another is the clock. Many of us use our phone as a watch. When it’s idle hit any button and nice big clock shows up along with the unlock slider. If you don’t unlock it goes back to sleep in like 5 seconds. Just long enough to read the time.
There are NO Pauses or waits doing anything, everything is instantaneous and graceful. Even when waiting for edge to load a page, a partial page is usable.
Ear piece seems on par with the
Mogul. Headset (Sony HBH300) seems louder than 6800 (just slightly). Speaker phone is soft but clear. The speakers are very capable because I have played some podcasts and they are plenty loud. But I tried listening to Podcast in my Jeep Grand Cherokee and it was just not quite loud enough. I hope simple turn commands from GPS will be loud enough, only time will tell on that.
We all know doing anything but talk on headset is dangerous while driving. But I’m sure many of you have fiddled with a phone while driving from simply turning it on and off to texting. I try to be good but I admit I’m no angle. The
iPhone is much safer in this regard. Huge buttons and clear display. GPS would be awesome on this unit and would even rival built in car models. Especially with audio integrated into the car.
Camera is brain dead simple. But better than I expected. Sorry never even had the chance to try 6800 camera to compare.
Google maps is nice. Fine tuned for
iPhone. It can show directions (ala mapquest) and step you through them. Maps are always up to date (NavTeq and TeleAtlas). You even get Satellite views and real time traffic. Just add a BT GPS and not that much software and you’re their. It’s very nicely integrated with Contacts better than I have ever seen any Navigation app do (and dead simple).
Weather app is very basic too. It updates everytime you pop it up. No need to update in the background. It updates plenty fast. Supported by the weather channel. Very easy to read 6 day forcast. Put in as many locations as you want. Flick you finger across the screen to drag in the next location (just like iPod photos). Hit the Yahoo button and it takes you to a web page of local news, weather about that location.
The Safari browser is just magic. It isn’t exactly relaxing browsing with the PPC. It is with the
iPhone. There is really only one “view” unlike PIE’s 12 views to tackle each situation. I say 12 because there are. There is 3 Views in pie, Default, One Column and Desktop, then multiple that by Full and Not Full, then Multiple that by Portrait and Landscape. And it’s a pain switching between them all. In the
iPhone there is really one View that can be elegantly Zoomed (using a couple methods) and rotated. Most of the time you’ll be in landscape. But to switch I’m sure you all know you just rotate the phone (I assume you could probably map that to a button on the
Mogul I never bothered probably take up too much memory or crash something). The best feature is dragging and double tapping. Just double tap an area of text and it will magically fill the screen with nice sized readable text. To scroll you just shove the text up (like flipping through iPod photos again). There is also acceleration detection here. The faster you swipe the further it will scroll (it has momentum). This only applies to stuff that is continuous (like your list of contacts). If it’s photo or album I think it will always stop at next photo.
Clicking link is impressive. There can be a tiny list and you just click on the center and you may hit 3 other links but it figures out you want the one you centered on. It does miss sometimes.
It is a true tabbed browser. There is a small iCon that changes when you have more than one tab. Tap it and your in the drag between panels mode again. Each one has an X on the corner to close it.
You can shutdown any app by holding the home button in while you have that app up. You can also shut the phone off or software reset it. You can only hard reset while docked with iTunes.
I’m sure you heard of pinching. Blah don’t like it. I do it different. I always plop my thumb down in the lower left corner and then drag my right index finger from my thumb outward diagonally towards upper right (or the reverse). Until I get the zoom level I want. Then I drag the page where I want it. Pinching never seems to get the exact zoom I was looking for and it often still need to be dragged to where you want it.
The seemless Wifi to EDGE and back is really nice. I’m at work or home 80% time which both have Wifi. I often didn’t use Wifi on 6700 because it drain the limited battery. And I don’t recall details if it would fall back to EVDO or not. But in any case EVDO was good so I never bothered with Wifi. But if 6700/6800 handled it so gracefully as
iPhone (including power usage) I would have left it on. It’s completely invisible. It slightly makes up for slow EDGE.
I was really worried about phone reception. Sprint was good. It has a few dead spots and the 6700/6800 were not exactly the best CDMA phones. 6600 had a great receiver. I tested the heck out of the
iPhone compared to the
Mogul. Pretty damn close. I still give the edge to CDMA. But it’s ever so slight. This was tested over a 120 trip from MA to NH. And actually trying to make and keep calls from both the whole way (not just looking at meters which can be very misleading). The
iPhone does have a flaw that the Antanna is in the back on the bottom. It’s sensitive to putting your hand over it. ONLY when you keep that clear does it compete with the
Mogul. My
Mogul works much better in the ProClip than in my pocket in weak areas.
I have not tried the ear buds yet nor played music on it. I may get a Dock for my Stereo though (more for podcasts like from NPR than music). I don’t plan on watching movies on it but I’ve read that folks are impressed with it.
The screen is very tough. I’m not sure I’ll buy a case or not. Never did with 6600/6700/6800. I do strongly believe in e-grips and slapped one on the back. It already fell off my lap before I did put it on and it would have prevented that mishap. I kept my 6700/6800/6600 in my shirt pock in winter and front pants pocket faced in in the summer. This was a pain. Because of two reasons. One when the phone decided to come on my itself I'd then bump the call button and call someone. Also when in pants pocket of course I kept screen inward. But on hot summer days it would get steamy on the front on the PPC. So I always took it out and left it on the desk. The
iPhone should not have any of these issues with the well thought out buttons flush hard screen. But right now I take it out because it looks cool.
The memory issue on the
Mogul is fairly serious but livable. But I had web pages crashing out with 23MB free on boot with just PIE running. I think it’s because it runs out of memory.
You cannot Sync over Bluetooth only USB.
Syncing is way faster with
iPhone and Outlook than PPC and Active Sync. It’s not syncing notes and tasks but those never took much time. I’m still trying to determine how well two PC’s sync with it.
ATT has been very good on technical issues. Before I discovered hand on antenna issue they were trying to resolve the issue. They have done a follow up call two days in a row. Because they called me it was not a free call. So they added 1000 roll over minutes to cover any support issues.
Ah now the keyboards. First off I’m not heavy text messenger. I do post messages on forums with
Mogul if I’m say waiting for my car to fixed at dealer or at a doctors appt. I don’t use the slideout keyboards. I came from Palms and I was used to the popup touch keypad. I’m not a fast typist on real keyboard either. As many reviews have said the wide landscape keyboard works fairly well because keys are spaced apart. The portrait one is tough. And not all apps can do landscape (like email). I think with practice you can get better like with any mini device. Indexing with your finger is nice in portrait because you have lots of room vertically. Indexing in landscape is a little tight. This needs little fine tuning. It’s really hard typing passwords in portrait mode because you can’t see if you made mistake. Your never quite sure when it may auto cap on you too. Sometime error correction kicks in when you don’t want it. But if you’re writing an email it does a good job. The keyboard is fine for my bandwidth.
A little more on reception. A friend of mine has T-Mobile and at his school they recently upgraded a local tower and he was happy. His friend got an
iPhone and I thought he’d be fine. But he said he gets no service at all. All carriers have dead spots but I was a little surprised after my exhaustive testing. I probably used 150 minutes of air time just testing.
Sprint people were awesome about taking the phone back and they don’t even try anything to keep you if they know you got an
iPhone (they know it’s too late). I’ll miss Sprint, they were good to me. I’m wonder what the long term effects of all this will be on all the phone companies.
Few more notes on the screen it's very readable in outdoors when 6700/6800 is not. It automatically turns the brightness up and down based on ambient light. So it saves battery and doesn't blind you at night and you can see it at the beach. When you put the phone up to your face it also turns the screen off to save battery. I thought the screen was the same size as 6700/6800 it's much bigger even though the package is smaller. I think it might even be as big as the 6600 (maybe in between). I was always disappointed HTC went from 6600 size to 6700 rather than make it thinner and sleeker.
iPhone screen is huge and more efficiently used than you'd ever believe with zero compromize to the user interface.
If I had to say run meetings from car while driving by phone I’d stick with CDMA. Or I had to Remote Desktop TETHERED from the road to support Work or customers. But as an Internet Device to say look up a price while in Best Buy, Check a book review while at boarders, Read and Reply to Forums in the Doctors office or catch up on email it’s a winner by far.
EDIT (after 2 more weeks): For the record I returned my
iPhone.
See
http://pdaphonehome.com/forums/apple...hone-over.html
