So last Friday, July 11th, I left the house at about 5:30 AM and joined the line about 30-people strong at the AT&T store in Ashburn, Virginia to wait in line for the chance to get my hot little hands on the new 3G iPhone. If absolutely nothing else I was excited to finally get rid of my Treo 650, a device that never lived up to its promise. I was too much of a telecom snob to buy the first generation iPhone despite my Apple fanboy status– the lack of 3G was just too limiting. Having lived with the iPhone for nearly a week now, I can definitely say that it was worth the wait.
Being a true ENTJ on the Myers Briggs framework, one of the things that I was most looking forward to was integrating the organizational, GTD brilliance of OmniFocus on my Macintosh into a handheld device. This has been a great improvement over the “To Do” list on the Treo because I can look at action items based on projects, context (i.e. where I am or resources at my disposal) and what is due soon or even (shudder!) overdue. OmniFocus also brings a To Do application to the iPhone, something the first generation phone was sorely missing. So sorry for the Windows users out there that I don’t think there’s an OmniFocus for Windows, but a person could probably use OmniFocus exlcusively on the iPhone. Next up in the life hacking effort is to use Jott and Evernote.
The transition from my .Mac account to MobileMe was not without its delays and hiccups. The synchronization of bookmarks, contacts and calendar events has gone pretty well once I got the service up and running over the weekend. So far, so good on that. I can see the potential for MobileMe, despite the awful brand name, to build on the so-so offering that was .Mac. I’m enjoying the AJAX-y goodness of the MobileMe calendar most of all, so that I can access a pretty full-fledged calendar from within Firefox at work, home and then using the Calendar application on the iPhone.
The top item on my MobileMe wish list is synchronization with Microsoft Outlook, the clunky productivity suite we use in my office (and pretty much any corporate environment). Microsoft hasn’t taken a real look at Outlook in at least a decade, and that bad boy is really showing its age. I’ll stop there for now because I could wrote a whole blog rant abotu everything that’s wrong with Outlook.
In summary: iPhone good. Fire bad.
