iPhone Road Test: Day 2

Docking the handset

Ian Williams, vnunet.com 16 Nov 2007

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.

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.

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