Create a Mobile office with Windows Mobile

With such a compelling title, I figured the article would be quite intriguing. 

I've had a lot of phone drama recently, dropping my WM 6.1 Dash and breaking it, leaving the replacement on the roof of my car and driving off, buying another imate but dropping it into a diet coke. So  I reverted back to my old beloved Voq.  A coworker of mine got in iPhone and hacked it up so it would play relatively nice with T-Mobile.  He wanted to get rid of it though so I ended up buying it off of him (I can almost hear Sahil gloating now).  Shortly afterward, I received a Samsung i780 as a gift so I've mainly been switching between the two (I still can't get the iPhone to work with my T-Mobile data service which gets frustrating).  I mention this b/c while the Dash was a pretty nice phone, it really didn't perform all that well.  In fact, it was often frustrating.  The 6.1 Flash made it a lot nicer but it still was rather slow compared to an iPhone.  I had gotten rid of my original iPhone before I really got a chance to use it b/c at first, i didn't like it.  After using it regularly for a while though, I'll admit that its usability is very impressive.  Its frozen up on my twice in about a month and  a half (with heavy usage) compared to the daily freezes I experienced with the Dash.  The comparison isn't completely fair b/c hardware wise, the dash is a lot cheaper.  And so I guess I'll just come out and concede that Sahil was right, with respect to consumer features, the iPhone provides a much better experience even when you factor in hardware differences.  6.1 mitigates some of that, but there's still a way to go. 

Although the iPhone's screen is quite responsive, I think I still prefer an actual keyboard.  Unless I'm extremely careful, I almost always spend more time correcting stuff then I do typing when what I'm working on is more than a sentence. Away from that though, there's the Push with Exchange and Sharepoint integration (which surprisingly, I find myself using quite a bit).  B/c I don't have wireless Internet on the iPhone, it might be a bigger deal than it should be but AFAIK, Push/Exchange isn't available on iPhone yet.  Another really annoying thing w/ iPhone that makes Windows Mobile more 'business friendly' is copy and paste.  I never realized how much I used it until I lost it.  And I guess I end up using copy/paste much more when I'm mobile then at work b/c typing is still not much fun but being able to quickly edit Excel sheets and paste stuff from word to Outlook and vice versa is huge. And I don't know if it's a true iPhone limitation again b/c I don't have my gprs, but I don't see any way to do internet sharing - from what I can tell, it's not doable with standard USB or Bluetooth.

As far as development goes, well, I'll give Apple some props for the iPhone SDK and I can't say I've spent more than a grand total of 15 hours trying to build stuff with it, but all else being equal, I still think that if I had to build any sort of critical business application, the compact framework not only makes it an easier trip, but it opens up a lot more doors.  I don't want to run my big mouth too loudly b/c some of what appear to be limitations may just be limitations with my familiarity of the SDK, but I'm pretty sure that WCF integration is off the table with the iPhone, as is MapPoint / LiveEarth.  Same seems to be the case for connecting w/ Sql Server or Oracle although the local db solution offered by Apple does the job pretty well.

At the end of the day, i can say I've really grown to like the iPhone and well, I already like Windows Mobile, even with some of the performance issues that would drive me nuts at times.  But I find myself using them for totally different purposes other than of course, to talk.  In the same way that I use my UMPC totally differently from my laptop, I find myself switching between these phones the same way. It'll be interesting to see how things develop b/c there's no doubt Microsoft is going to use Silverlight to greatly enhance user experience w/ Windows Mobile 7 and it's a  similarly safe bet that Apple is going to try to make the iPhone better at business applications. For now, I'm just really glad I can swap out a SIM card and use whichever I want b/c having to make a firm choice between one or the other would be a real bummer.