Is the iPhone really that good?

I recently had a chance to evaluate the Jesus phone.  I have a lot of experience with smart phones including Blackberry 7000 series all the way to the Curves, many different iterations of Windows mobile phones, Palm OS via the Treo 650, and many more.  The iPhone didn’t turn out to be quite deserving of its name when considered from a business user’s perspective.  Read on for a list of things that I experienced while using the iPhone.

1. The battery life sucks.  I’m fairly accustomed to not charging my phone for 2-3 days.  I can’t even have a full work day with dinner and drinks afterwards without having to charge my phone.  Why shouldn’t I be able to check my Active Sync e-mail once an hour or so, and take 3-4 calls per day without my battery running out?

2. It is kind of…big.  When I hold this thing up to my face, people stare.  I guess most die hard iPhone fans like this and imagine that the people staring are having gadget envy.  I, however, felt like a trendy jackass.

3. No keyboard?!  WHAT?!  The touch keyboard sucks.  The predictive text sucks.  Training my dictionary was a huge waste of time just to hit a baseline productivity.  For business communication, you just can’t allow typos and mistakes to come through.  These kinds of mistakes cause one to appear sloppy and lazy.  Even without this standard, the mistakes coming through on text messages, e-mails, notes, etc. are really irritating.  I suppose that you could get used to it, or better at it, but I never needed that kind of “training” to use the keyboards on my Blackberrys, or my T Mobile Wing, or my Treos!  It took me so much longer to get out a three sentence e-mail on the iPhone that I often asked myself “why don’t I just go to a computer to finish this?”  It absolutely killed my productivity away from my desk, and irritated me to no end.

4. It isn’t really a phone with entertainment options on it.  It is an entertainment device with a phone built into it.  The primary purpose of the phone is obviously NOT a communications device, and the design of both the UI and the phone itself are a testament to this.

5. It sticks to your face when you talk on it for more than a few minutes.  It is slippery, too, I dropped mine twice.  That being said, it is quite durable. 

6. The signal isn’t that great, side by side, my other phones were often in signal when the iPhone was out, or had a better data connection.

7. Oh the fingerprints.  This device will have you cleaning it 20 times a day, if you have any kind of standards for appearances.

Those problems are really quite…numerous, for something people often refer to as a Jesus phone.  This phone is meant for people that have a primary purpose for a device that they carry with them everywhere…entertainment.  If you are often listening to music, and watching television/movies, reading websites, etc. on the go, then this is the phone for you.   You don’t need a phone to talk to your Apple Store music collection.  You never need to text your downloaded Season 3 of South Park.  You probably don’t need to communicate much at all, just be sweetly and quietly entertained.  For the people who are actually doing business and communicating with friends and loved ones often, this is not the right phone.