iPhone 3G first impressions.

I've had a Nokia phone for a while and have been resonably happy with it. I can make phone calls, send text messages (SMS) and the calendar works pretty well. I've previously been saying that I didn't really have that much interest in the iPhone for 2 reasons:
1. I have pretty basic demands (see above) for my phone, I don't really use most of the more advanced features.
2. I thought the iPhone was a bit too big. I want a phone that fits easily in my pocket and I thought the iPhone would be too big for that.

Since then, Apple have made the iPhone 3G and several friends (that bought it) have showed it to me and let me play with it. All in all I came away impressed enough that I bought my first Apple gadget/device ever.

There is no doubt that Apple have created a very nice gadget and in many ways leapfrogged the competition. The hardware is quite nice and the design is, as with most other Apple hardware, impressive. I'm sadly not particularly impressed with the battery life.

The interface is also very nice, I'm already quite fond of the way it handles text messages (SMS) for example and the other applications seem to be nice as well. I haven't had the iPhone long enough to really say much more about the applications than that. It doesn't support MMS's though, which I find quite odd, though it doesn't really bother me. I don't really use the camera in my phone (I have a good DSLR) and sending lousy pictures to my friends isn't exactly high on my list of important features.

Not all is good though. First, to activate the iPhone, you have to install iTunes on your Mac or Windows PC, connect it to that. I don't know whether this is really Apple's decision or not, but it's stupid. I hate lock-ins and this is one of them. Why? Because it's always the customers that looses. Furthermore, my primary desktop is running Kubuntu Linux - is iTunes available for Linux? Of course not.

For me though, the biggest issue with the iPhone is that I can't sync the calendar as I want. I can't even easily move my current calendar entries to the iPhone. I've used zyb.com for quite some time to sync my contact list and my calendar. They support loads of phones, you have to have a pretty rare phone for them to not support it. their service makes it very easy to switch to a new phone and you always have a backup of your contacts and your calendar in case you loose your phone. It's a simple, great service and I highly recommend it. You can use zyb.com to sync your contacts on your iPhone, but for some reason, Apple haven't implemented SyncML for the Calendar so you can't sync that - BUMMER! It seems, more or less the only way for me to get my current calendar entries copied over is to install Outlook, sync my old Nokia phone with that and then sync my iPhone with Outlook through iTunes. That's hardly optimal, especially not since I don't use Outlook. It also means I will probably have to live with my calendar not being sync'ed.

Apple: PLEASE, implement SyncML for the calendar, NOW!

All in all, I have to say that it is a very nice phone so far. I really, really would like to see the calendar sync fixed and the battery life is less than impressive to be honest.