davecozens wrote:Right.The one thing my n95 has taught me is that there's a lot of things a smartphone can do that you'll never actually do with it. I've had ftp. And bit torrent. And terminal clients. Never used em except to go "ooooh, look, I can do [insert impressive thing]".
The one thing my n97 has taught me is that there's a lot of things you'll want to do that just won't work properly.
The one thing my wifes iPhone taught me is that everything on it works, all the time. Pretty much without fail. It might not do all the things a smartphone can. But with something like logmein I can just remote in to my laptop and do it from there.
I dunno if you heard, but there's a new iPhone in town. Looks fab. Has a camera that's only 5mp - but I've had an n97 for the last year FFS, i'll be happy with anything halfway useable.
Envirophone will take my n95 & n97 for about 200 quid, which funnily enough is about the same as the amount of line rental I've got left on my t-mobile account.
I'll get me coat...
D
I have been using a 3gs as my main phone since last August and as a pocket computer it is really pretty good but it isn't the perfect all round device some Apple zealots would have you believe.
For those of you thinking of switching to an iPhone here are a couple of downsides to be aware of (you may already know this Dave as your wife has one already).
1. Phone reception is very poor. The 3gs regularly drops calls in locations where my N95 has no trouble holding a signal. This is reported as having been improved in iPhone 4 but it was also said that the 3gs was better in this respect that the 3g, so I'll believe it when I see it.
2. GPS reception is very poor. Whether using Copilot, Sygic Mobile, or Google Maps the position locator has a habit of switching to side roads when I am on the motorway or thinking I have turned off when I haven't. It also has a habit of freezing completely for several minutes at a stretch which has caused me to miss my junction on more than one occasion. I have finally resorted to buying a seperate gps for the car which takes this off the table as an issue for me but does mean I have a lot of wires trailing around. To be fair, Apple used to say that the built in GPS wasn't good enough for car navigation...right up to the point the first sat nav apps were released when they changed their mind. Funny that.
3. The camera is not much use unless you have rock steady hands. This is because there is no dedicated shutter button on the side of the phone. You take the picture by tapping the screen which nearly always causes my shots to blur (this might just be me though).
4. There is no built in profiles system. You can get around this, as I have, by jailbreaking the phone and installing a profiles app from Cydia but if you go down this route you do start to move away from the "it just works without any fiddling" ethos. Even with the workaround its still fiddly to change profiles in a hurry.
5. There is absolutely no way I have found to automatically download my podcasts directly to the device. Again this might just be me, others might not mind having to sync to iTunes everyday, but I do expect my phone to work standalone when I am away on business for example. Even downloading podcasts manually is a pain in the arse as you have to switch between the iPod app and the on-board iTunes over and over again. If anyone has a way to this via jailbreak or appstore PLEASE let me know as this bugs the hell out of me.
6. Notifactions of email and calendar events are of the "blink and you've missed it" variety. There is no way, out of the box, to return to a previous notification after you've cancelled it and the thing is you HAVE to cancel it if you're in the middle of doing something else as each notification appears in a seperate dialog in the middle of the screen and you have to either "cancel" or "open" before you can continue with what you are doing. If you choose to "open" you lose what you were previously doing when you come back the app you were previously in. There's plenty written about this on the web if you want more detail.
7. The built-in calendar is very average but Apple doesn't let third party developers build replacements that work against the built in calendar database. The upshot is that if you use an Exchange server or sync your calendar with Outlook you are stuck on the default calendar with nowhere to go.
8. I know its been talked about ad-nauseum but the lack of Flash video for sites like the BBC or SkyNews is irritating.
9. Having jailbroken my phone I now find it crashes every now and then, mainly when I am on phone calls unfortunately. Again, this might just be to do with the way my particular phone is configured.
All that said, the 3gs still turned out to be better for me than the N97 Mini that I trialled for two weeks. Everybody on this forum has my respect for persevering so long with the N97.
I personally hope to be able to return to Symbian with the N8 but if the user reviews on AAS after a couple of months aren't positive I expect to be going for the Motorola Milestone XT720 which has Android, a 3.7 inch screen and an 8mpx camera with a xenon flash. This is based on reviews of the current Milestone which are generally pretty positive except for the keyboard and camera.
I hope this helps with your decisions.