iPhone Purchase

January 4, 2008
Through the 2007 festive season, I took a decision to buy the Apple iPhone. I had been keenly aware of the technology for some time as press coverage and the might of the Apple marketing machine had blitzed all manner of media.

Purposely, I decided not to pre-order for the launch day, and I didn’t go for a look in any of the stores as the desire for a new gadget could potentially overtake the rational mind.

Throughout December I kept an eye on the forums, making sure that there were no major glitches with the hardware or software. All reports were favourable, but I already had a business Blackberry 8310 and really couldn’t decide if I’d make use of the iPhone at all.

I was reading the PC PRO Awards 2007 magazine, and the iPhone received the 2007 Technology Innovator award. It wasn’t so much the award that roused me, but the quote that went with it;

The iPhone made every other smartphone on the market look like yesterday’s
technology, with its stunning touchscreen, intuitive interface and flawless
build quality.

With an accolade like that, how could I leave it?

I headed to a Carphone Warehouse and discussed it with the sales staff. We talked about existing number migration, and the now notorious O2 18 month contract. I was still hungry for the iPhone, and signed away £35 a month for the next 18 months. The iPhone itself was £269.

On the journey home, I unboxed it to see what features were available – the only thing was an emergency phone call. All functionality on the iPhone was unavailable until it had connected to iTunes and been registered with Apple.

So I installed iTunes 7.5 and connected the iPhone and was presented with a series of menues for registering a payment card with Apple (for iTunes purchases), and registering with O2. I already had a PAC code from my current network provider to port my existing mobile number to the iPhone, and entered this accordingly. I was allocated a temporary mobile phone number until the existing number had been ported and informed that I would get an SMS message letting me know when this would happen.

Next I had to set options for synchronising email, calendar, notes, browser favourites and iTunes. When complete, iTunes started synching to the iPhone.

One of the things that interested me was the minimal user guide that accompanied the iPhone. As a technologist I’m used to reams of pages in pdf files, often sent on CD. There was no such material with the iPhone – all you get is a Finger Tips quick start guide. This was either a major oversight, or the device was so good that you didn’t need a manual. Time would tell.

It was heartwarming to see the iPhone ask for the encryption key for my home wireless network, and then using that data conection for sending emails and browsing the web. I have to admit that typing messages was a highly error-prone experience at first, but as the quick start guide suggested, the automatic spelling correction just needs to be trusted.

The tech specs show that the operating system is based on OS X, and after using Apple Mac desktops and notebooks for a couple of months I can clearly see the similarities. The Safari and Mail applications are identical to their full blown counterparts, with the iPod application utilising the touchscreen technology. Scrolling though lists in portrait mode is easy, and coverflow takes the crown in landscape mode. It’s a beautiful way to browse your music collection.

The Phone application is very intuitive, and closely tied into your contacts. Voicemails are converted to audio files and downloaded directly to the handset. There are buttons for Favourites, Recents, Contacts, Keypad and Voicemail. With your contacts on the phone, it’s a case of touch the number and click call. You can even call numbers directly from a web page. Again, all you have to do is touch the number and click call. Considering this is the core application, it was important for Apple to get it right. The ease at which you can make calls is amazing.

Overall I’m very impressed with the iPhone. Although the data speeds are only capable of 384k max through the EDGE data services, this is more than compensated with the excellent wifi connectivity. The 8Gb onboard flash is enough for the time being, but I have several gigabytes of digital content and I’d like to get it all onto a single device. I’d imagine that once larger capacity solid state devices become cheaper to manufacture, the newer iPhones will have much more disk space.

Will it replace my beloved Blackberry? It’s too early to tell, but I’ll be writing about that in the near future.

Leave a Comment » | Apple, hardware, iPhone | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Noel

Night at the Office

November 23, 2007

It had to happen sooner or later, the planning for the migration of hosted Exchange email and Blackberry services had been on going for a couple of weeks and the deadline had been set.
The MX record change was very smooth; we had been allocated 6.00pm GMT for the change to take place, and this was verified around 6.30pm on dnsstuff.com. Once the MX had been changed, I completed the email export from the hosting company, and imported these into the Exchange mailboxes on the new server using Outlook profiles on a workstation set up for this transition.
The interesting challenges came when configuring the Blackberries to talk to the new Blackberry Enterprise Server. In order to test this, I had requested 2 Blackberry 8310 handsets, along with Blackberry Enterprise Server activated SIMS from Vodafone. These arrived, and when powered on, showed that the handset had been connected to the Blackberry network. This was even verified by sending PIN to PIN messages between the handsets. So all looked good.
However, when connecting the new 8310 to the internal BES server using the Enterprise Activation option on the handset, the device would time out, and the Blackberry Manager would show no connection. Needless to say that this was somewhat disconcerting as I expected the handsets to function as they were brand new, and the SIMs were activated.
I searched the Blackberry Forums and came across an article about the 8300 not working with Vodafone, which was exactly what I was looking for. The problem outlined here reported the handsets as faulty, as when the SIM was placed in an older Blackberry it would work.
I hadn’t tested this, and luckily had a couple of 8800s that also needed migrating. I started by activating them on the new BES with their existing SIMs, to confirm that the handset and SIM combination would work successfully with the new BES server. This was successful. The next step was to use the same SIM in a new 8310 and see if I was having the same problem as the forum article suggested. To my surprise, the SIM activated with the new Blackberry, and all applications were working. This clearly pointed to the SIMs not working, even though this had been checked twice with Vodafone.
The final piece was to put a new SIM into a known good 8800 Blackberry and try to connect – this failed as expected. It was 4.20am and at last I knew what the problem was.
Vodafone was contacted on Wednesday, and they instantly said ‘the SIMs haven’t been activated for Blackberry Enterprise Server – I’ll do it now’ How I wish they’d said it on Monday evening.
A special thanks to Stephen Grant for helping me bounce ideas around at 10.00pm on a Monday evening!

Leave a Comment » | BlackBerry Enterprise Server, software | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Noel

BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1 for Microsoft Exchange 2003

November 1, 2007

I’ve been looking into getting BlackBerry Enterprise Server installed with a single Microsoft Exchange Server organisation. While it is by no means difficult, it is also not that easy either. By that, I’m referring to the hoops that you have to go through to get the two systems to talk to eachother. For example, the creation of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server service account needs to have local server rights for authentication, and Send As rights in the Exchange Mailbox store to sent the email over the network.

Microsoft have been a big advocate of macros and wizards, and I don’t see how difficult it would be to run a wizard to check the current configuration, and make these modifications. The only problem that I see with this is that it may remove the ‘black art’ status that BlackBerry environment has gained. Thus far, I’ve not had any experience with the instant messaging components of the BlackBerry product suite.

I’m an avid user and am loathe to commit to another IM application. However, as a corporate IM solution, the BlackBerry handhelds are a great medium if you’ve already embraced the technology for email. At some point I’ll extend the BlackBerry infrastructure to test the IM features.

Leave a Comment » | BlackBerry Enterprise Server, software | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Noel