I kind of went crazy with iPhone software after I got a 3GS. The speed increase of the GS is staggering compared to the original iPhone and visibly faster than the 3G. With the speed bump I found my phone much more useable and I went on an activation and app downloading craze, including activating my work Exchange account. Exchange support seems to work quite well. I basically just turned it on, set it to sync mail, calendar and contacts and, aside from now having 2 of every contact everything just worked.
Now I felt all set, I could finally discard my work blackberry (surely someone else at the office could use it…) cause I had my work mail and calendar on my phone. I could even provision new cloud servers and SSH to our VPN’d production servers, if needed. Everything was great and amazing, a mobile technology and productivity marvel.
But something was missing. At first I wasn’t sure what. I knew I kept checking my phone for new mail and that it felt annoying. So I looked at the Blackberry on my desk and it was obvious. The iPhone, even 3.0, doesn’t update the lock screen with any information. Surely this must be a setting or something I thought. No. After searching endlessly through the settings and in Google it would seem the only good solution out there at the moment is Intelliscreen. Oh well I’ll just get Rock Your Phone and jailbreak my phone and get that! Nope. Rock Your Phone doesn’t support the 3GS, at the moment anyway.
One has to think that either Apple or Rock Your Phone will rectify this in the next 12 months, but it’s still quite annoying and it makes the Exchange support seem kind of half-assed. Apple is clearly aiming at Microsoft’s enterprise dominance and leaving out something as simple as better indication of whether or not one has new mail almost feels like a silly oversight.
Tags: 3gs, apple, blackberry, exchange, iphone, mobile, rock your phone