iPhone Exchange Integration – Review
August 27th, 2008 - 3 CommentsSome of you may have read my post on troubleshooting iPhone and Exchange 2003 I wrote up a couple of weeks ago. In case you still don’t know, the iPhone will only work with Exchange 2003 SP2 and Exchange 2007. 2003 NEEDS SP2 to be installed and there is a not so intuitive procedure for finding out what version of Exchange you are running…so check out the post if you are still having problems with your iPhone and Exchange 2003.
I wanted to write up a little review of my first impressions of how well the iPhone integrates with Microsoft Exchange as there is a lot of hype on both sides of this issue out there. First, a little background. I have been using the Cingular 8125 for three or four years now (also known in some circles as the HTC Wizard). The 8125 is a Windows Mobile 5 phone that has a slide out keyboard, large touch screen and uses Cingular’s/AT&T’s EDGE data network. This phone, while pretty bulky, has served me very well for a long time. I could never give it up because the touch screen made using the windows features so much easier and faster. Plus, I had one of the best products Microsoft has going called Voice Commander. If you have a Windows Mobile phone, you will want to see if this thing works on your phone model…it is truly incredible. Combined, this was a winning combination for a long time.
While in New Orleans for Jazz Festival this year, I used a friend’s iPhone and was pretty impressed with the user interface. But, they still had not released anything allowing for Exchange to integrate. Then comes the announcement that Apple was planning on releasing the 2.0 software for both the 1st and (yet to be released) 2nd generation, aka 3G, iPhones which will provide Exchange/ActiveSync integration. I have learned my lesson many times about being an early adopter of technology and using it on something as mission critical as a cell phone or main computer. This time however, I purchased a mint condition 1st generation iPhone a few weeks after the 2.0 software came out.
Exchange With the iPhone
So, how does it work? Amazingly well. After figuring out that I was not running SP2 on my Exchange 2003 installation, everything worked perfectly out of the box so to speak. I left all of the default settings in the Exchange setup on the iPhone. This means that I am setup to sync email, my contacts, and calendar between my iPhone and Exchange server. Plus, push email works flawlessly.
Sub Mailboxes
I have access to all of my “sub” mailboxes quickly and easily…it simply takes a few seconds to download messages from a sub-mailbox. With Windows Mobile, I would have to dive into the ActiveSync options and configure it to fully sync each mailbox next time it sync’d with Exchange….less than ideal, but it worked. On the iPhone they are right where they should be….accessible.
Layout
Given that the iPhone screen is bigger than my Cingular 8125’s, the amount of real estate Apple can use to display email information is bigger. But, as usual, they seemed to have spent more time designing the layout including font, color, size, etc. The end result is that the information displayed is easy to read, names of senders bolded in large print, subject line bold in smaller print and then the first few lines (how I have it configured) of the email are shown in regular text that is slightly smaller still.
Attachments
This is something that I expect the Apple team will tweak a bit more. All email attachments are found at the bottom of the email, no matter how many replies there are in between. This is slightly annoying if you have a long email thread and someone decided to attach a file to the last one. But, it is not that big of a deal. The bigger item is that I cannot double-click to zoom in on PDF files…making most not readable. In comparison, my 8125 used an application called ClearVue to view PDF files. This application, while allowing for zooming in and out, was buggy, slow and almost useless (because of the speed). ClearVue could not open many PDF files I received for some reason and was not something I spent any time trying to figure out.
I had heard somewhere that iPhones could not read Microsoft Word files…that is not the case. While you cannot modify them, you can read them, zoom etc. The Excel file reading will display individual sheets of a multi-worksheet file, formatting (bold, lines, highlighting) as well as zooming in and out. For me, this is all I really would want.
Contact Integration
Contact integration is pretty good as well. The alphabet runs vertically in small print along the right side of the screen. If you want to jump to a certain letter, you click on it, or close to it, and you then jump to that letter. This takes a little longer than I would like, but then again, I have about 400 contacts. Surprisingly, it is very good at detecting what letter you are selecting even though your fingertip covers about 4 letters. This will probably get some tweaking along the way, but is more than usable in its current form. More importantly however is what you get when you click on a contact. All phone numbers and addresses are displayed, plus a picture at the top, and two buttons to text or add the contact to your “favorites” list. The favorites list is a great way to have fast access to people you call and is accessible from the phone button. You can also easily select a ringtone for a contact via a button. As with most of the iPhone GUIs, you can slide your finger up and down on the contact list to quickly run up or down the list. Tapping or holding your finger on the screen will stop it…cool and functional.
Calendar
Lastly, the calendar function. I don’t really use the calendar function to add things to my calendar from my phone…usually. I typically use these functions when I add appointments to my desktop calendar with alarms. This has been one of the most important reasons for Outlook/Exchange integration on cell phones for me since day one…alarms for events and appointments. The iPhone handles them well. The display of calendar events is decent. It was better on my Cingular 8125 as events and times were displayed on the main screen in a list. You can view your calendar by Month (default), Day or List. The Month display is nice for seeing when you have “free” days. If you have a day with an appointment, it shows up with a dark dot…free days do not. The Day display gives you a nice clean hour-by-hour display of your day…showing any appointments. The List display gives you all of your upcoming appointments listed by day and time…pretty nice.
All-in-all, I give the Apple team and A for their Exchange integration. IMHO, it is better overall than the one found on Windows Mobile phones…and this is coming from a guy who walked away from the Macintosh 15 years ago. While the keyboard takes a little getting used to, I think Apple has the best solution out there right now, especially when you add in the rest of the features and usability of the phone.
[tags]iPhone, Exchange, Exchange 2003, Review[/tags]
thanks for this info. Now im planning to use exchange with my iphone, im too lazy to use it right now, but i will need it, cause i want to keep things organized.
I am a little miffed with the calendar functionality on the iPhone. Syncing over the air works well with Exchange. However, when i attempt create an appointment on the phone i cannot see a way of adding attendees/recipients to appointments.
Am I missing something?
I’ve actually found the calendar integration with Exchange quite poor. Often the sync will be lost with Outlook and requires going into the calendar app to get re-sync’d.
Another major issue is that (at least on my phone) I can’t edit calendar events that are created in Outlook. If I create it on the phone it is fine but I can only Accept/Maybe/Decline exchange events which doesn’t really make sense.
Anybody else have these issues?