I patiently waited past iPhone 1.0 until I heard that they had "better addressed the needs of business users". Just about a month ago I took the plunge. I love the general organization of the device and the "eye candy" user interface is very useful most of the time, but even with the 2.1 bug fixes, this product is not ready for prime time business users.
Probably the biggest single drawback is the lack of a local application for entering data, syncing data and backing up data. Many businesses that I work in, including mine, have web filters that do not allow access to iTunes. Therefor, I can backup, sync or otherwise maintain my data until I get to a PC with iTunes installed and access to the iTunes website. Plus trusting Apple with all my data backup, having no local access to it and having no way to enter information other than through the iPhone itself is a major oversight. This alone has made me re-think my decision.
Data importing is dismall at best. It took me almost two weeks on Apple's web site, with Apple support, on blogs and hundreds of emails to get my Palm data into the iPhone. And when it did, I could not map any of my fields from one of the WORLD's two most popular PDAs into the iPhone contacts. I could not create new fields, I could not assign new names, and the steps it took were ridiculous for a company that claims they want to play in the business space. To make matters worse, during the two weeks that I was trying to get my contacts imported, I had hand entered over 100 contact records that were immediately wiped out (with no backup) and overwritten. Thanks Apple.
Add to this the following:
No ability to Cut, Copy or Paste between notes and emails or emails and emails.
Major lags in button selections, ignored button presses, unititated returns to the home page, and device lockups.
Painfully slow data entry with no support for Grafitti, a stylus or even a desktop app.
Weak calendar importing support. And you can only have one calendar. Synching to mutiple calendars wipes out existing data. Needs to be set up like the multiple email accounts (which I REALLY LOVE!!!).
Inability to edit or create playlists on the iPhone itself.
No video capture or camera control.
No Excel or Word viewing or editing support.
Larger font sizes only works in some of the iPhone apps.
Landscape and portrait modes only work in some of the iPhone apps.
You cannot selectively delete data like voice mails. Its all or nothing.
The Contacts database is horrible. They ignore fields found in every popular PDA like record type (business, personal, etc.) but have stupid fields such as "phonetic pronounciation of first and last name"! What is that about? You cannot map incoming data to the fields you want You cannot change field names. You cannot add fields. You cannot data import or export, and the syncing they use for importing is virtually useless since you cannot do any of the other items above AND it overwrites existing data.
If you want multiple iPhones on your account, you have to pay an additional $40 per month or more per phone!
Taken all together, this product is NOT ready for adoption by the real world of business. I'm just glad my 30 days isn't up as I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to return this iPhone...
I so wanted this to work...
