My first experience with a "Smart Phone" was a Palm Treo. I bought the phone because I did not want to carry both a Palm Pilot and a cell phone around with me and I could run my Act Contact database on the Palm Treo. It had the capability to access the internet but it was terribly slow. It was painful to try and do anything on the web. It had a 1.o megapixel camera that took blurry pictures and video. Nonetheless, I was happy with it because I could get into my contact database while I was on the phone. I was thrilled to have consolidated my cell phone and Palm Pilot into one gadget.
The next step in my smart phone evolution was a Blackberry Pearl. Email worked great. It had a slightly better camera. The internet experience was tolerable. Surfing the web was still a little painful, but I could read the news or access my online banking without too much trouble. It was around this time that the iphone came out. I did not run out and buy one immediately for two reasons. The first was the price - I think it was around $500 when introduced. The second was that I would have to go on the AT&T network. I have been a Verizon cell phone customer since 1997 and I have found the call quality and reliability to be excellent. I conduct a lot of business on the cell phone and I cannot afford to have dropped calls. I had friends that were on AT&T and had heard too many horror stories about how lousy their network was.
Soon after the iphone became available on the Verizon network in 2011, I purchased an iphone4.
Nine months into the iphone experience I am just amazed at what it can do. I have had zero technical problems. The apps are easy to install and they work well. With a single device, I have consolidated the cell phone, satellite radio,navigation system, kindle reader, digital camera, digital voice recorder, video camera, ipod(or mp3 player) into one gadget! And that's not all! There is an app for everything and I can usually find what I need with free app. I had no idea before I bought one just how great a device it was. I don't even bring my laptop with me anymore when I leave the office because I can pretty much do whatever I need to to do on my iphone.
As a business tool, the messaging works really well for me. It's really easy to cut and paste phone numbers and info into text messages. I have become a bigger fan of texting since getting my iphone. It's a great way to stay in touch with busy colleagues. It is much more efficient than leaving them a voice mail message. If they have an iphone and there is a phone number in the text they can click on it. Addresses in text messages will take you to google maps and navigation.
The one criticism that I have is the email. There may be an app out there to address this that I am unaware of, but it's hard to go back through and search your emails. You have to scroll through them chronologically to find an old email. If you are an uber-emailer and you have to go back and search for old emails then you may not be happy with the iphone.
Last but not least, the iphone works great as a plain old phone too. Voice quality is excellent. Battery life is good, I get a full day's use out of a charge. I like the visual voice mail where I can see all my voice mail messages and choose what I want to listen to. The speaker phone works great too!
Do you have questions about your phone system or telephone service? Please feel free to contact me!
Adam Stern
Atlantic Business Systems
410-239-2227
astern@absphones.com
www.absphones.com
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