Hi
I recently bought an iPhone and want to share my experience in moving from my 18 months old Motorola L7 SLVR to the iPhone. Having done that, I still have theSLVR and actually my wife is using it now instead of her older Nokia
Migrating contacts
The first step for me was to migrate my address book. As slick as it is, the iPhone was useless unless it had my address book ! The 2 phone numbers I can remember are my wife’s and my mom’s ! I guess that makes me a lazy tech junkie but that’s the truth.
So I went on to install the “Motorola Phone Tools” software which came on a CD in the SLVR box on my new Vista Toshiba laptop, then connected the USB cable to the SLVR and started “detecting device”. It didn’t work. I lost 2 hours trying to make it work, before suspecting a “Vista” problem and switching back to my wife’s laptop which is (luckily) still running XP - and wham ! it worked like a snap..
(I really hate Vista for that… so many applications don’t support it..)
I moved the contacts back to my laptop using the SLVR as a USB flash drive (that’s one of its best features) and imported into iTunes, synced back to my iPhone …
Using the iPhone as a Phone
Using the iPhone as a phone was a bit unnatural at first.. Apple made some unique choices in the way the address book is presented, but I really liked the “Favorites” tab. However the Groups thing was a bit disappointing since you have to do it on the PC first and sync via iTunes.
in the Call history list, the incoming calls, outgoing calls and missed calls are all listed in the same list, sorted by date & time. Missed calls are luckily highlighted in red. However it is a bit unusual vs the Motos & Nokias where received calls are distinguished clearly from outgoing calls..
The iPhone’s SMS handling is very neat. It uses a “Gmail”ish way of handling SMS’s as “conversations”. Its on-screen keyboard is really great and easy to use with the forefinger, so you can type quite fast on it. However there is no “forwarding” of SMS’s and also it doesn’t support Unicode encoded messages, meaning your relatives abroad’s messages or some Web to SMS messages can come scrambled
Add to that, the iPhone’s does have a very handy “silence” mode using a left hand side outside button, so you can easily switch to silent mode and back in a snap ! However I found that the ringtones are not loud enough, therefore when you’re in a mall or a crowded place it makes it hard to hear the phone ringing
upcoming in part 2 : Using the iPhone as an Internet tablet