bye bye Treo! Hello iPhone!

Well Folks, the day you all thougth would never happen has arrived. Joe's personal productivity tool of choice is now an Apple product (long dramatic pause)!!

Today I switched from my trusty GoodLink enabled Palm Treo 750 to a sexy new 16GB iPhone 3G. As most of you know, we are a big Microsoft shop, so switching away from Windows Mobile on the surface seems entirely backwards. Before today, my productivity tool was GoodLink, not the underlying hardware. My productivity tool is now the integrated ActiveSync functionality which is all Microsoft! Atleast that's how I'm justifying it :)

Honestly, I was getting pretty fed up with my Treo. The Treo hardware is decent, I can type 50 words per minute on the mini keyboard using my thumbs, i had installed a 3rd party over sized battery pack so I could make an entire day (and I had a charged spare & travel charger in my bag at all times).. sounds perfect, no? The browser was pretty much useless. The screen resolution sucked (the Treo 650 was better!).. but worst of all? It just plain quit working well as a phone!

Now, I will admit, it was mostly my fault. We have a CRM application that exports all of our contacts into an exchange public folder. That folder now has over 5000 contacts. It was GREAT having 5000 contacts available for a dial at any minute. It was even nicer that *I* didn't have to input them! As anyone in the company adds/updates the contacts they were instantly available on the Treo via Goodlink's public folder contact sync. The problem? With 5000 contacts in the phone it would hang trying to look up the caller-id to display on inbound calls? The result? My phone would continually lock up and people would get voicemail. I was able to answer MAYBE 1 out of 5 calls.

Ironically, ActiveSync doesn't even attempt to sync public folders. This means I'm now on a new device with only about 2 dozen personal contacts. It's not a fair comparison, but boy does it feel good to be able to navigate through my phone and accept phone calls! I'm sure it's not going to be so pleasant when I'm on the road and need to reach someone and do not have access to the CRM database.

It took about 3 minutes to make the iPhone sync my email, personal contacts, and calendar from our exchange server. We have Exchange 2007 deployed with a OWA front-end all prepped for ActiveSync. I had to enter my email address, domain user-ID, and domain password and I was in. It was so easy I'm betting even a sales guy could do it!

First Impressions sofar are really good. Tomorrow will be the real test. If I can make it a day without powering back up, I'll be very pleased..... Stay Tuned!