September 3^rd 2009.  That was the day I finally managed to convince Jamie to switch to an Apple iPhone!  We had been using Windows Mobile based phones (HTC Touch) for the past 18 months and were pretty pleased with them.  However in the past 6 months or so, many of our friends, family and more importantly customers have been upgrading to iPhones.  With each small snippet of use to setup their Microsoft Exchange email, I grew more and more impressed with the iPhone and quickly became convinced it was better than any other mobile phone on the market.  All I had to do was to convince Jamie!

As popular as it is, I actually think the iPhone suffers a little bit with Apple’s image problem.  Whilst it’s obviously not affecting their overall success as a company, there still seems to be a stigma attached to them, in particular with their hardware seemingly being all about style but with no substance.  I’ve even had conversations with customers who have totally written off the idea of getting an iPhone having not even used one simply because ‘everyone else has one’.  I defy anyone to use one for 10-15 minutes and not come away impressed.  In fact just using one was all it took for Jamie to be convinced.  Now a month in, we both absolutely love them.

As a business looking to move to iPhones, we were still a bit cautious in that they needed to be more than just a flashy gadget.  We needn't have worried.  The iPhone has all the business functionality we had with our Windows Mobiles – Microsoft Direct Push email and Exchange syncing for contacts and calendar, only everything is so much faster, more intuitive and without the need to faff about with a stylus!  Couple that with the amazing screen, full featured web browsing, voice recognition and the fact that yes, there really IS an app for everything – who would ever choose a Blackberry?  (oops did I say that out loud?) ;)

So us FIRST4TECH engineers have finally caught up and are now using the iPhone, and to be honest we’ve never felt more instantly connected to our business and our customers.  Additionally, we can’t get enough of Spotify for iPhone and I just beat my record on Paper Toss!

If you’re wondering who the new FIRST4TECH engineer is with the ponytail , goatee and Khakis, playing Monkey Island on his iPhone, it’s probably Jamie. :)