iPhone 3G[s]

[Mark]

Originally Posted by Blighter

It's crap and the guys that sold it to me told me porkies about it as well as didn't provide me with a copy of the T&Cs like they are legally required to...

Oopsie! Serves them right that it sounds like you used their own T&Cs against them then. As it happens, I agree with you - the G1 is a version 1.0 device and it shows.

My nearest Apple store appears to be London, so I'll probably wait a few weeks, when I'm hoping to head to Liverpool for a bit. Unless, of course, the local O2 store is willing to let me have an extended play.

[Feek]

Originally Posted by Burble

Apparently it is available if you phone them or ask in store but it isn't available to add to your order when ordering the iPhone.

Ahh, excellent.

[Daz]

Originally Posted by Burble

Please do - I'd be interested to hear your take on it.

Well, the grumblings are around the enterprise features of a phone which is supposedly enterprise grade. It's marketed as a platform for business, and it looks swish enough, so the bods at the top decide they want it and order a bunch for directors and SMT, so we have to support it. Usual story.

So, lets talk about some of the reasons you might deploy the iPhone in your reasonably sized business. Probably most importantly, Exchange ActiveSync - hooray! No letting people hook in via POP and IMAP and get your free/busy data, great stuff. But they only implement a subset of the Exchange 2007 EAS policies, and after a chat with a guy in technet, they apparently didnt even want to implement remote wipe, but Microsoft require it, and Apple eventually gave in. Apple can get away with telling joe consumer what they want, but they cant tell an business what their users need, that's our job tyvm.

Speaking of which, I do not want to deploy iTunes to half the machines in an organisation. It's a big, invasive app, and I have enough apps to maintain thank you very much. But ok, lets concede that point and bite the bullet..... there are no MSIs ready to deploy via AD or whatever systems management tool you prefer. You can jimmy an MSI out of the installer, but you have to hack it around in Orca to get it to install, and you try patching that a few months down the line. It's unmanageable the moment you deploy it. Oh, and it requires Quicktime, which has the same problems. Great, thanks. So what's my solution, give my users admin rights to their machines to install it themselves? No, I'm not going to do that, but for the sake of moving on, lets say I do.

They provide a tool to generate device configuration profiles, which works rather well, you can include third part root certificates, set the default location for exchange, vpn settings etc etc. Lots of good stuff. Well, except there are some settings that can only be set using configuration policies. God forbid a user might actually want to look at and verify some wireless and vpn settings themselves. And you can only deploy it by either sending an email link or web link. Which you cant do without setting up an email account. For which the settings are in your configuration profile. Hmm. Ok, so you can instruct your people to manually type some url into safari to kick start it off, but hang on... I've just sold my soul to the devil to get iTunes on these people's machines. Why cant I instruct iTunes to do that?

Why cant I also tell iTunes, or the phone itself for that matter, that upgrading the OS needs administrator approval first? We have guys that develop for mobile platforms, and the apps needs to be tested and certified for that platform so the business can rely on that functionality. We need to vet the software updates first. We cant do that if people are arbitrarily updating the software (I've not checked, but I believe with the latest version of iTunes you can disable both automatic and user initiated searching for device updates, but how you then actually authorize an update for deployment I have no idea). And our apps can only be updated using iTunes, not over the air.

The software in and around Windows Mobile caters for most of those kind of requirements, and so does Blackberry's stuff. Even Nokia do a pretty damn good job. While none of them are perfect, and have their own quirks, the software around those platforms scale from 1 user's personal mobile to large enterprises business and corporate policy requirements. That is well written software(s).

... but their ui's suck

None of these things are insurmountable, but they go against Apple's general stance of 'we know what you want and that's that', which works very well for a single or handful of users. A tightly integrated experience can be very pleasant and slick. But I dont want tightly integrated, I need some decoupling, or at least some big gaping hooks into stuff so I can manage it to suit business policies and requirements. Better group policy support for iTunes would be such a massive step here (and by that I mean an msi I can deploy without modification, and an adm file plumbed into some sufficiently powerful hooks to control it's behaviour). It is not beyond the capability of the software engineers at Apple, but it is beyond their current culture (I could write a whole other post about their (lack of) involvement in the security community on this point).

..... anyway. Thread thoroughly derailed.

Outside of the business, I quite enjoy Dee's iPhone. I especially enjoy Peggle on Dee's iPhone. But locking 3rd party apps out of the iTunes library is a serious annoyance. Again, not beyond the capabilities of Apple to fix, but beyond the lock in culture.

I suppose in summary, I would say that the unarguably uber slickness of the iPhone (and indeed OSX) is more down to a huge investment in a relatively small, but very impressive, tightly integrated set of ui widgets. The underlying software is too narrowly scoped - for political reasons - to consider Apple a truly great software company.

If people do want to talk about this we can take it into another thread, or better yet, over a beer sometime

[Kreeeee]

Originally Posted by Desmo

Aye, ui is a better phrase to use

Wonder what they'd do with a games console

Have a pretty interface and case but lacking the hardware and software to match its rivals

Basically a Wii without the decent games.

[Burble]

Originally Posted by Daz

<snip>

You said pretty much exactly what I thought you would and I agree entirely.

It's a battle I'm facing more and more each day and can only get around it so far because the company have a Europe wide Vodafone contract and we don't make exceptions to that for anyone.

[Desmo]

It's here.....and it's already running Orange

[Burble]

Good man. Did you use purplera1n and ultrasn0w for the jailbreak and unlock?

[Desmo]

Aye

[Burble]

I was looking at doing mine last night but read about some potential problems so I'm probably going to wait until 3.01 (or 3.1 as it seems to be called in some places) is released and jailbreak it then.

[Toby]

Originally Posted by Daz

Burble did

One of the sales guys came to me with one to setup his Exchange email for him. It is nice and zippy, surprisingly so, but it's no quantum leap. Pretty much what was expected really.

Got any tips on setting one up with Exchange - two of them showed up today and I'm awaiting the boss descending on me to get it configured with Exchange, something I've never done before as we've used Gooseberries up until now