Apple iPhone
iPhone Road Test: Day 2

iPhone Road Test: Day 2

Docking the handset

Written by Ian Williams

When you dock your iPhone for the first time there's a short wizard to take you through the process of activating the phone and setting up your synchronisation settings.

This is pretty straightforward if you use a Mac or run a version of Outlook and Internet Explorer.

Advertisement

At work I happen to use Lotus Notes and Firefox for my email and internet access, neither of which the iPhone knows how to deal with, so for the time being I'm stuck without any contacts, calendar, email or favourites, so I'll need to hunt down some workarounds to this.

I'm not surprised about the lack of support for Lotus Notes as very few synchronisation programs know about it, but the lack of interaction with my favourites in Firefox is a bit annoying, although not particularly serious as I can easily copy my favourites from Firefox to IE and sync that way.

It is about this time that I ran straight into my second headache, the iTunes interface. I have thousands of songs in my music collection, many of which were encoded many years ago when we went through the laborious task of ripping CDs in WAV files and transcoding them to MP3 and renaming each file one by one.

The long and short of it is that the tags and other metadata for most of my music is a complete mess so I rely mainly on the file name and directory structure of my music folders to sort most of my music. In case you don't know, the one thing you can't sort by in iTunes is directory or filename.

For those of you who are used to using iTunes and have your music neatly organised, this may be less of an issue, but even still I found iTunes clunky and not particularly intuitive to use.

This is, of course, a personal observation and I'm sure I'll become more proficient over time, but a quick canvas around the office seems to indicate that a lot of other people feel the same way.

So, overall, first impressions are pretty good. The iPhone is undeniably sexy and getting it up and running will be fairly straightforward for most people who use a Mac or Microsoft products, which will be the majority.

And if you're proficient with iTunes and have it set up and working nicely, then getting your media onto the iPhone will be a doddle.

Once you've got the iPhone activated and your content transferred, you'll want to personalise it a bit, choosing a ring-tone, background and the like.

I'm happy to say this was very simple to do. Unlike iTunes I found the iPhone's interface very intuitive and the menu system makes perfect sense so it was only a matter of minutes before it I had it set up the way I wanted.

Tags:

Related whitepapers

Related jobs

Do you agree?

IT white papers

Search vnunet IThound

Top categories

Job of the week

Search thousands of IT jobs :

Search thousands of IT jobs:

Advanced search

Hiring now on ComputingCareers:

Related IT jobs

Search thousands of IT jobs :

Search thousands of IT jobs:

Advanced search

Advertisement

Advertisement

Newsletter signup

Sign up for our range of FREE newsletters:

Existing User

Newsletter user login:

Enter email address to edit your newsletter preferences

Watch

Podcast image

28 Nov 2008

12.57 MBComputing podcast - Standard Life's offshoring plans; and the prospects for government IT More...

Shaun Nichols and Iain Thomson

28 Nov 2008

7.11 MBPodcast Special: Views from the Valley More...

Shaun Nichols and Iain Thomson

21 Nov 2008

9.11 MBPodcast Special: Views from the Valley More...

Poll

Microsoft

Unified Communications: Collaboration

Unified Communications: Collaboration

What is the main advantage of using collaboration technologies?

Previous poll results

Spotlight

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

Review: Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

The first Xperia smartphone bodes well for the future   More...

VMware

VMware View 3 enhances virtual desktops

Virtual clients now take up less storage space and can...  More...

Apple iPhone 3G

Linux lands on the iPhone

Developers put kernel on Apple handset   More...

Data theft

IT staff desperate to keep their jobs

Most would work longer hours for less pay   More...

Primary Navigation