A while ago now the UK mobile phone operator Orange announced that they would be starting to sell the iPhone (as soon as the UK exclusivity deal with Vodafone had ended).
As a business customer of Orange I registered my interest in having one. For the last 3 years I have been using a Blackberry 8800 on the Orange network. To be honest I have been very happy with it; it has been a useful tool to have with me on the road and out on client sites. So happy with it that I guess the only thing that would make me give up the BB is if I had chance to swap it for an iPhone.
Anyway a few weeks ago the telephone call came through from the Orange Business Customer Services team, and I duly jumped in and bagged a 32gig iPhone 3Gs. The upgrade deal being offered was exceptionally tempting (especially the all-inclusive data usage), and the 600 monthly minutes of inclusive talk time, and 200 texts, per month over an 18 month contract was no dearer than my current BB tariff.
And so a week later that magical white box arrived and thus started my journey into iPhone ownership.
I’ll admit that I was prepared for some degree of upheaval. The act of changing handsets is never easy, and switching from the BB to the iPhone did mean I was forced to re-evaluate my Contacts database before executing the synchronisation. This proved to be a bit of a cleansing moment, enabling me to break free from the many hundreds of accumulated numbers of people that I have not spoken to in years, of purging old saved numbers for people who have long since changed numbers.
However it would seem that that was the easy task….
Once I had my new phone updated with a (now) streamlined contacts database, the full reality of what I had done began to sink in.
First to hit home was the loss of my custom ring-tone.
I am happy to admit that I did not get into the big “ring tone download” scene that seemed to sweep the UK (and probably elsewhere) a few years ago. For a while (with my much older Nokia and Motorola Flip phones) I had simply hacked down an MP3 of a particular favourite Beastie Boys track and uploaded on the phone. It became my own ring tone (a sort of trade mark or signature tune) for my phone. And so I happily ported it between handsets, with it eventually ending up on the BB.
But now it was gone.
Second thing to hit home was getting to grips with the text-entry interface. I’m not sure who was ultimately responsible for the design, but I assume that they were a nimble-fingered person, whose digits were pointy and precise! I may be middle-aged, but my fingers have yet to descend into resembling some of Walls’ ™ finest! However I still found the entry of text to be painstaking! The margins between hitting the right “key” and the wrong one appear to be wafer thin.
The final home truth was the “single application running” (I’m sure there is a better turn of phrase for this).
Sure, its primary duty is a phone. And wow, the email facility does seem to run in the pseudo background. But the dawning reality of it all was, if I switched from my Twitter App to email or some other app, I would not get any further notification of new Tweets. Come on now Apple! Even my beloved BB was capable of supporting multiple processes running concurrently. The push email was superb, and the Twitter application would happily sit in the background and wink the little “red eye” when new tweets came in! Moving over to the iPhone was like moving from a polyphonic keyboard to a the Stylophone ™
Maybe they have all this technology and capability, but wish to drip feed it to the public, forcing regular upgrades, thus perpetuating the revenue streams….
Anyway, the deed is done. I have made my bed, jumped onto the iPhone bandwagon, and will have to lump-it-and-like it. I’m sure it will grow on me. But for now I will refrain from selling-on my old BB handset and hang onto it just in case of emergencies.