Dobbs Ferry, New York July 2007 — Two weeks ago, I stood in line for four hours to buy an iPhone on its launch date. I was lucky and got the last 8GB phone in the Scarsdale AT&T store. Lucky, because I was standing in line for a friend in Germany and he would have been disappointed if I hadn’t come up with a phone. This friend let me use the iPhone over the weekend before FedExing it to Europe. By Monday morning, though no gadget freak, I was completely won over and back at the store ordering my own iPhone for $600.
What’s so great about the iPhone is the way it delivers email over-the-air. I have owned a Treo, Blackberry and Windows Mobile device so the comparison is firsthand. Unlike the Treo and Blackberry, the iPhone does not truncate the email message. With the feature that lets you scroll through the email by sliding your finger across the screen, it is a pleasure to scroll up and scroll down the full message. Even more impressive, iPhone email includes the full attachments as well. So over the weekend I could read a 55-page mark-up of a legal document right on the iPhone while having custom sandals fitted in an East Village atelier. I gave my Treo to my daughter who views it as a neat SMS input device. My little M&A firm can’t afford a Blackberry server and all the proprietary Microsoft software that you have to buy with it.
I download my email from an affordable open source email and collaboration server made by Open-Xchange. At the Apple store in Soho, the salesman showed me how to set it up on a secure link and we toggled to WiFi for speed and within one minute the iPhone was filled with all 7,500 emails from my Open-Xchange IMAP account. I can also pull down email from my POP3 account with attglobal.net.
The great thing about all of this is that I didn’t have to buy anything extra and I could configure the whole system with the help of a retail salesperson.
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