I wish I had an iPhone.

I wish I had an iPhone. I’m definitely not the first to say that, or think it. In fact, I was wishing for an iPhone long before they were announced. Or, I was wishing for a mobile phone that was different from what I had, and different from what was available. It turned out the iPhone fulfills most of what I was looking for.

About a year and a half ago I traded my Palm Tungsten C PDA, and Motorola V600 phone for a T-Mobile Dash smartphone. I had been a long time Palm user, and T-Mobile customer. The Dash was the closest thing I found to replace my two devices with one. Since that switch I’ve had a lot of time to reconsider my choice, and how well it has worked for me. Let me dispense with the suspense: Windows Mobile 6.0 for Smartphones sucks. The Dash hardware has been a resounding “meh”.

The Windows Mobile experience starts with the interminable wait for the phone to boot up. There is no good reason for a phone to take this long from power up to the time it is able function as phone.  Mine has the extra bonus of now repeatedly rebooting for a random period of time. I’ve let it reboot itself for over an hour to see if it ever was able to boot. Now, I just keep it on all the time. At night, I put it on the charger and turn off the ringer.

Unfortunately, the fail just keeps on coming after it boots. One of the reasons I choose the Dash was the WiFi capability. When it works, it works okay. Not great, not good, but okay.  To turn it on means pressing the ‘Start’ button (modeled after everyone’s favorite Windows feature) and scrolling to find the comm manager application, turning on the WiFi radio. Then ‘Settings’ , ‘Wi-fi’, ‘Wi-fi Networks’, and either pick one that displays or press ‘new’, etc, etc. I don’t like doing that much work to use WiFi on a desktop or laptop, with a decent UI and pointing device. It really sucks to do it on a handheld device with a compromised UI and 4-way controller.

This points out the main flaw with Windows Mobile 6.0 for Smartphones. It is like it’s name, too much button pushing for the benefit. Everything takes too much UI interaction, too much typing on a compromised keyboard, too much scrolling on a compromised screen.

I’ve added a number of 3rd party applications (at considerable cost) to try and make the phone more usable. It has helped, but some of the apps, Pocket Explorer and Pocket Outlook come to mind are just beyond salvage. I’ve been waiting for one of the several Explorer replacements to arive, but none are stable enough to rely on. I’ve tried several replacement mail clients. While some were improvements in basic functioning, they all try to pile on too many other marginal features that get in the way of basic function.

I won’t go into the entire debacle of trying to sync my Dash with my Apple MacBook Pro.

So, why an iPhone? I’ve played with the iPhone several times. I’ve spent time performing the types of operations I (try to) use my Dash for. And, it works. It works well. Apple continues to show us what a good UI looks like, and how it works.

And why haven’t I bought one yet? I’m not ready to pony up the considerable sum for an iPhone, and until AT&T and Apple have a 3G iPhone to offer, I’ll wait.