Disclaimer: I hold no bias toward Microsoft or Apple products, cell phone providers or specific phone devices. They all suck.
Since I was getting so much crap from everyone about my iPhone rants, posting my work experience with one as I evaluate it from the perspective of IT Manager of a multi-million dollar feature film production seemed like good fun
I'll start with a little back story so one might gain an understanding of where I'm coming from and what I expect from a phone... a work tool that I've come to rely upon for timely information delivery.
In the beginning...
2 years ago, after many years with Sprint, frustration for lack of cell phone signal in my office got the better of me and I decided to look for a solution.
Attempt 1: boost the cell phone signal in the building.
The feature production I was working for at the time was very responsive to the idea that we could get an indoor cell phone signal booster for a reasonable price (~$800) to essentially boost all cell frequencies (except for Nextel). At the time, they were only interested in Verizon signal (the principle producers were all on verizon) but as luck would have it the same device was billed to worked well with ATT, T-Mobile, Sprint... We ended up getting and installing something similar to this:Cell Phone Amplifier but worked with more frequencies. I'm not sure what the gain was (having trouble finding the exact model...) Worked great for Verizon, so-so for AT&T and T-Moble... not so much for my Sprint signal. Producers were happy, I was back to the drawing board...
Attempt 2: Switch to Nextel for zero cancellation fee but renewed contract.
Sprint had just bought Nextel and I had done some research with a colleague's Nextel phone to find their signal to be fantastic. The dilemma here: I was used to my sprint Treo (loved it!) and there were no phones like the Treo in the nextel line of phones. Options were extremely limited. I did a TON of email and texting from these devices so I had to settle for a blackberry... 7520... a behemoth of a phone and my first experience with a blackberry device. Other than the phone being HUGE, it worked great. I quickly got used to its awesome email delivery (even without BES), easy to use qwerty keys, contacts, etc. The shear size of the phone and it's clunky scroll wheel left something to be desired and my monetary mistake was to use the phone for more than 30 days before coming to that realization. I was hooked on the blackberry service, though, so....
Finally:
One massive cancellation fee later and I'm using a nice looking and feeling Blackberry 8820 on the AT&T network. Bonus feature: No Camera. In my industry where studios try to control every bit that goes in and out of a studio, one cannot be accused of taking rogue pictures if one does not have a camera, right?
8820 Rave
I can't tell you how much I loved my 8820 (thanks Nicole!!!). It was a remarkable device. The blackberry email functions were extremely timely... worked with every account I threw at it (4: including 2 exchange accounts) without the need of BES (sure you lose some functionality, but you can only use one BES server at a time), sync'd up with outlook perfectly, and kept all my contacts well organized and easy to access (even with odd SMS groups). The scroll track-ball was very intuitive and easy to use. SMS was a breeze with a great white-lit on black face keys. The device was fairly fast and never really crashed on me. It sent a simple notification if it was having problems getting email from any of my many accounts. The battery life was tremendous, almost 2-3 days of standby time (unless I was using wi-fi, as expected), had a removable/replaceable battery, removable memory chip and a very readable, brightly lit screen. I kept the device in vibrate mode almost exclusively. The buzzing was audible enough for me to distinctly hear it across the room, not annoying enough to piss anyone off but instead alert them to it's attention, and was powerful enough to feel while in a holster attached to my hip driving in my car. Admittedly, I could not tell the difference between the vibration of an email (or string of emails) and a phone call, but again, that was very expected. BTW, the phone never turned off, went to sleep, stopped receiving emails for any reason whatsoever. There was no way to ask it to poll less for emails (does it poll?... the way blackberry does email is freakin magic), but only gave you very basic screen options for helping with battery life. (see previous comment about battery life).
iphone intro
In the mean time, while I'm screwing around with the 8820, the first gen iphone came out. Our producers had PAs stand in lines at AT&T Stores to buy them. Employee's missed work to get their hands on one. I'm sure you all witnessed or were a participant in the madness!! As it turned out the iphone wasn't just a phone... it was a smart phone... a computer of sorts... something fairly complex no matter how simple Apple tried to make it. Thus, my initial experiences with this device were co-workers plugging them into their computers, downloading itunes upgrades, wondering why their PCs weren't recognizing these as USB devices, trying to understand why calls were dropping, etc. As an IT person who's asked on a daily basis to understand exactly how anything that plugs into a wall works, I was being asked to support this thing... whether I had one or not. Over the course of the next year-and-a-half, more and more co-workers were switching to this device and thus more and more support calls regarding iphones were coming in. Most recently, I received a support call about why someone's iphone didn't receive emails or was able to surf the web in South America. "Call AT&T," responded, but they persisted because it doesn't take an automated voice system to get me on the phone. After AT&T sorted out their international issue and they returned to the States, again calls about why their phone had stopped working. After 2 hours asking them to call AT&T, they finally did and sure enough, the provider had mistakenly disconnected their domestic data service when international was added. Go Figure.
Conclusion
So you see... getting or at least experiencing an iphone first hand was inevitable. If for nothing else, to better understand what co-workers, friends, colleagues go through on a daily basis so I might better serve their needs. Will the iPhone live up to my blackberry? Facebook rants of my initial experience resulted in some flame wars so I made a real decision to give the device a chance for a full week of real work: 1/5 - 1/9. Lets see what this thing can do, right? I'll try to find apps that help me with every day WORK RELATED things (no, the lightsaber application doesn't count as something needed for work, Brian...). I'll find tweaks to phone configurations to help the device work better for me. At the end of the week, I'll evaluate and see if this is a phone for a heavy tech user like myself. onwards and upwards......
