The following post will concentrate on the impressions of an iPhone user without promoting or humiliating Apple’s product.
iPhone appeared when the level of mobile devices development showed necessity to combine a phone, book-reader, pdf reader, digital voice recorder and mail client in one device. Hp hx4700 was the only device of such kind previously, but its operating system was far from being perfect. Finally the decision was made to embody all these functions in Apple.Let’s try to figure out how Apple managed to incorporate the idea of a universal mobile device.
Phone
It must be admitted that phoning functions are not implemented in the best possible way by Apple. No auto-reply function (which is important for drivers with a headset in an ear), Spotlight – which caused so many rumours – works not always faultlessly. Company search works fine, but the text in the contact details notes is simply ignored.
SMS and MMS chats is a great addition. But when sending SMS to multiple people, iPhone automatically prompts to send MMS as well not taking into account that some recipients may not have configuredto send it.
File Reader Book
Shortbook is the application which does almost anything. It is not worse than AlReader or HaaliReader for Windows Mobile. The only problem is files downloading. They can be either downloaded from the Internet, or via ftp connection. Or local network files sharing can be used.
PDF browser
Pdf browser was tested on the iPod Touch 2G. While its predecessors, RepliGO for PDAs, required each file be converted and did not guarantee normal viewing.
GoodReader is the major tool used for Pdf at iPhone. Although browsing small documents (up to 30 Mb) is possible with the help of Files Lite.
Recorder
First, Apple did everything right, and voice notes were of unlimited length and could be organized but it all disappeared with firmware 3.1 which limited the voice notes to 77 Mb (approximately 35 minutes).
Possible drawbacks
iTunes. They can be divided into two groups:
1. Program failures.
The most irritating errors are : “Failed to synchronize iPhone: not enough permissions for this operation” and “Can not save the iPhone library file: not enough permissions for this operation”. In the first case, the phone aborts the synchronization. In the second user has to upload the application again.
ITunes shows these errors when working under admin account as well.
Another draswback – duplication of programs.
2. Synchronization oddities
Only two options are offered in terms of content synchronization – either it is synchronized, or deleted.
Tags: apple iphone, iphone, iphone 3Gs, iphone applications, iphone developers