My friend George and I get together most Saturday mornings for coffee and conversation. While chatting this morning, George gets a call and he unholsters his iPhone. He gets a funny look on his face and says, “It’s from Steve Mays.”

I’m thinking it’s from Barb. She couldn’t call me for some reason, so she rings up George.

“No,” he says, “It’s from your cell phone.”

I pull my Tracfone from my coat pocket and, sure enough, it’s calling George.

If you are unfamiliar with Tracfones, I should tell you it doesn’t have a “redial” feature. And while I have George’s number in my phone, it’s about six down in the list. So how could this have happened?

I would have had to bump (against my chair) the down arrow six times… and then bump the “dial” button. Now, I ask you… what are the chances of that happening and the recipient of the call be the person I’m talking to? Hmmm?

I’ve known Marhall Wilson since he and Barb started working together at the same law firm (Marshall has recently moved on). If I had to guess, I’d say he’d be better at fixing a broken generator than partitioning a hard drive. I don’t think he’s goofy for gadgets like many of my acquaintances.

So when I heard he’d purchased and iPhone, I was curious about his experience to-date:

I carried a Treo for several years. The Treo was my introduction into
“smart phones.”  I was instantly hooked on the mobile email and internet
access. Following the recent death of my Treo 650, I purchased a Blackberry Curve.  I was unsatisfied with the screen size and quality. I missed the touch screen feature, and I never became comfortable with the “roller ball” navigation.

I was hesitant about the iPhone because (a) I do not need or use an iPod, and (b) I had read that the iPhone wasn’t well suited for “business” use.  The screen quality plus the way the different applications worked together was the big seller for me.

I purchased my iPhone on the 20th (I’m writing this on Thursday the 25th) so it is still new to me. I am thrilled with it.  Our computer tech guy set it up so that the device will reach out and retrieve my emails every 15 minutes.  This is more than satisfactory for me.  The screen is just stunning.  The following are some of the pros and cons
in my opinion and in my limited experience:

• Pro:  did I mention that the screen quality is stunning?  Viewing videos, photos, and websites is a pleasure.
• Pro:  I love the built-in Google maps with the satellite photos.  The
  clarity of the screen, with the easy zooming in and scrolling around
  make the map feature fun as well as useful.
• Con: no GPS.
• Pro: safari, the web browser, is great.  Being able to open 2 or 3 or
  ?? Web pages at a time is great.  It is happy to show you the whole
  page (too small to read) and then zoom in to whatever field you wish.
• Pro: the way it will switch from vertical to horizontal mode while viewing photos or the internet is great.
• Con:  If you take a photo vertically, you can get whiplash trying to
  rotate the device to look at it sideways because it will automatically
  adjust itself to the new orientation.  Perhaps there is a way to lock
  out the rotation, but I haven’t found it yet.
• Con: the internet reception in my house is worse than with the Treo or
  Blackberry, although phone reception in the same location seems fine.
• Pro: Out in the real world, internet pages load plenty fast enough for me.
• Con: the virtual keyboard is as bad as you’ve read about, although I’m
  learning.  I wouldn’t want to “have” to be typing lengthy emails all
  day.
• Con: no zoom or video on the camera, although I never used the Treo’s video camera all that much.

Overall, I love it, and I haven’t even utilized the music piece of it. The phone, internet, email and text messaging features are as good as or better than the Treo or Blackberry. Having YouTube, Google Maps, and a simple weather site resident on the device is great fun. Having only 1 button is plenty. I should also mention that the screen is really impressive.

In a day or two it will have been 30 days since the iPhone went on sale (CNN reports sales have been disappointing). I popped off an email to Tom Piper, George Kopp and Dave Morris to see if they were still as pleased with their iPhones as they (Tom, George, Dave) were when they first got them. I haven’t heard back from Dave yet, but Tom and George filed reports… after the jump.

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