And this time they've got my wife too.
With the announcement of the new iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software, and mobile.me; the announcement of 3G networking and GPS; and the price cut down to $199 for 8gb and $299 for 16gb models; Mel and I will both be getting iPhones, and signing up for mobile.me.
Right now, we both carry around a smartphone, and a separate MP3 player (yes, our smartphones CAN be mp3 players, but they don't work well in that role); and there's a complex dance of multiple synchronizations required to get our media, contacts, calendars, and files all synced... and even then there's lots of issues with duplicated or out of date items; and there's no push, pull, or over the air sync for anything except hotmail and pop-email. It's even more difficult for us when we try and coordinate schedules and the like between us.
With the iPhone and mobile.me, everything just works. You can automatically sync over the air, with outlook, get push mail and two way sync from exchange, sync your outlook into mobile.me and have two way push to and from the iPhone, as well as to other computers (both Mac and PC).
The damn thing even has native Cisco VPN client, for connecting to my work network; and my company is one of the participants in the iPhone enterprise beta program, so we'll be supporting all the exchange integration features etc...
They've even fixed full iWork, and MS Office file access, natively. Theres already a native suite of connectivity tools, including remote desktop, ssh, FTP and SFTP, and other basic UNIX tools, announced for later this year.
Combine that, with some of the other apps already announced with the full SDK, and the iPhone really has no equal as a smartphone; unless you absolutely need to have a hard keyboard. Now that it's got 3G and GPS, there's really nothing keeping me on the windows mobile platform, and LOTS of reasons to leave.
If it comes down to it, I won't need my laptop with me for most essential computing tasks.
I can only think of two apps or services that I won't have with the iPhone (neither of them necessary for work), that I might miss from Windows Mobile: Napster to Go, and Mobipocket.
I would guess that Mobi is already working on MobiPocket reader for the iPhone; and it's been bandied about that The Steve has considered offering a subscription based music service (though I doubt it's going to happen).
A few months ago I said that if Apple got the SDK right, added 3G and GPS to the hardware, opened up the development program, and rolled out wide to many countries and providers they would become the standard mobile platform for the world.
Guess what?
They did it.
I bet Ballmer is throwing chairs all over the place right now.
