I replaced my Treo 650 with an iPhone last summer, and have been pleased with the results.  Here’s what I’ve noticed in the past six months.

Email

It is not push, but when I pull it – it is fast & complete. Though I initially ran my own email server (for years), I’ve recently switched to Gmail IMAP & everything works & syncs perfectly. I have no complaints about email on the iPhone. Viewing a typical Word document attachment functions ‘out of the box’, but complex docs lose formatting when viewed.

Web browsing

The iPhone shines here. I can’t say anything that hasn’t already been said… it is simply the best mobile browsing experience I’ve had. Bookmark handling is a bit clunky though, but is usable.

Calendar & Address Book

If you have a Mac, you’ll appreciate how effortlessly you can manage your calendar & sync it to the iPhone. Previously, I didn’t use iCal on my Mac because I couldn’t sync it to anything useful. With the iPhone, my Contacts (Address Book), iCal and Safari bookmarks get synched each time (or as I’ve config’ed) I connect. This is exactly what you expect from a mobile device that is attempting to extend your desktop.

Physical Case

Surprisingly durable – no major scratches after six months. The glass face is probably fragile, but certainly not prone to casual scratching. I carry mine in my front pants-pocket, and have been fortunate enough not to have dropped it (yet…)

Camera

Pretty darned good for a phone-camera. The camera isn’t really that important to me, so this isn’t a deal breaker. But the photos from the iPhone are significantly better than those from the Treo.

Video

You already know that iPhone doesn’t do video.  I’ve missed this feature a few times, so I hope (probably unrealistically so) that a future update will magically provide video capture support.   I’m not naive, though, so I fully expect this to come in a new hardware package (i.e. iPhone v2).

Tags: iphone, apple

Popularity: 78% [?]

Facebook’s new advertising program, Beacon, is so flawed with regard to its privacy controls that you shouldn’t use it. But since Facebook has waffled about whether & how you can actually opt-out of this, you should just block it.

Unless and until they change the technology, this simple technique will prevent Beacon from sending anything from your browser sessions to Facebook’s Beacon. Apparently, all the javascript that controls this is located behind a common URL: facebook.com/beacon

Using a URL-blocker with that in a rule should do the trick. Here’s where I learned about this:

http://tinyurl.com/2xjak6

Popularity: 45% [?]