I used, or attempted to use an Apple iPhone on AT&T for almost four years. The phone and service worked great in my hometown of Oakland, but performed abysmally where I work in San Francisco. The iPhone touch interface and “they just work” apps cemented my loyalty even as the phone stubbornly refused to make or accept phone calls during the majority of my working hours. That is except when I went to the “phone booth,” that special corner office where all the iPhone users went to make calls because that’s where the signal was least weak.
Now the iPhone is coming to Verizon–an act that likely would have kept me on an iPhone. Instead, I’ve broadened my horizons and am now happily using an HTC EVO 4G on the Sprint network. There is the matter of battery life, which is just sufficient to last through the day, and the sketchy Android Market. But overall, I love the large–but not too huge 4.3” EVO display, and the fact that in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, this phone makes and takes phone calls like a champ.
(I say the Android Market is “sketchy” because of the wildly varying quality of the of apps. Whenever I enter the Market, I feel like I’m entering Mos Eisley Spaceport–without the guide. As I’ve written before, I much prefer Apple’s insistence that apps work before they are made available to consumers. The Android Market’s dependence on the “wisdom of crowds” to weed out broken or phone-breaking apps–of which there are many–means that lots of people get to waste a lot of time reading user comments on apps that look fetching but don’t work.)
I think that the iPhone 4–a beautiful and very functional mobile device–running on the workhorse Verizon network is going to be a compelling choice for enterprise users. I just wish it hadn’t taken so very long for what seems like a perfectly reasonable partnership to come into play.