I eventually gave in and got an iPhone. I've previously used another O2 phone - the XDA which has now been discontinued and replaced with other versions, and although it linked into the web it didn't have all of the functionality that I wanted. I'd played around with it in the shop and wasn't impressed with the touch screen - it was really difficult to type accurately, so I put it to one side. At about the same time my mp3 player was beginning to annoy me. I looked at the iTouch, which had pretty much all the features that I wanted other than being a phone, so Jill and I looked at the iPhone again and I decided to give it another chance.
I don't actually use my phone that much, so the £30 a month tariff was fine, even though we had to pay £159 for the phone itself. I tend to keep phones for a long time, so found this was actually a cheaper option than a larger tariff and free phone.
First problem - how to put in the sim card. When I opened the box I missed seeing the little paperclip device and illustration, but a quick trip to YouTube sorted that out for me. O2 said that it would be up to 48 hours for the new sim to take over my old number, but it was more like 4 hours, so I was online almost immediately. This was both good and bad news, since it meant that the process of swapping data over was going to be a pain. We simply couldn't find any way of backing up contacts from the old phones to a pc running Vista, which doesn't use ActiveSync (as far as I could find), and as we only have the Home Premier version on her machine it didn't have Outlook. So we couldn't save contacts that way. Eventually I had to use my XP machine to copy to, then import and export again. It was a real nuisance. However, it's done.
Onto the phone itself. Very slim, slightly larger in footprint than the XDA mini though half as thick. Very fast and very intuitive. I was actually surprised at just how little the phone came with in terms of manual. Like - nothing. But to be honest, it's not really necessary, since it's pretty easy to work stuff out. I have started to load on some of my music, which means copying to the pc with iTunes and then syncing again, so it's going to be a little laborious. The music I had on my old machine was stored in a different format (Sony), so it's a bit of a pain, but there you go. I've not tried any of the applications yet in detail, other than to check they do what they should, and I've not tried downloading anything from the Apps store yet.
So far I'm reasonably impressed. I still don't like typing on it, but otherwise, not at all bad. Expect more comments later.
A bit late now, but for future reference: new service Soocial can backup and synchronise contacts lists, not just from phones but between phones and email accounts. Worth a look:
http://www.soocial.com/
Posted by: Paul Raven | November 20, 2008 at 02:23 PM