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Saturday, June 30, 2007
I downloaded iTunes 3.7 to activate my gorgeous new iPhone and within minutes I was activated and my Verizon Wireless number ported. Now it was a matter of syncing.
Why Apple can’t have iTunes look at your Library size prior to attempting to sync is beyond me. I have never had an iPod that could hold all of my music (not even my 5.5G 80GB iPod) and it’s really annoying when iTunes attempts to sync 100GB plus of music onto your 8GB iPhone. But hey, it figured it out eventually. 
After that, it started to sync my Outlook data and issue number one was my Exchange server settings. iTunes ran its course while Outlook took 50% and more of my 3.0GHz CPU time. About five minutes later, Outlook finally responded to my mouse clicks and I was able to use it. iTunes displayed all the POP accounts but absent was my Exchange account. Even though I checked one of the POP accounts and hit Apply in iTunes, after as started re-syncing, iTunes unchecked my selected POP account. This happened over and over never sticking. As for the Exchange account, I’ll have to manually set up the IMAP connector to it on the iPhone itself.
Calendars seems to be another issue. I instructed iTunes to sync all of my calendar events. With over four years of events, I know it’s a large task, but dude, if my lame XV6700 Windows Mobile phone could do it, so should the iPhone with its 8GB, right? Well, no. Not a single event appeared after syncing.
My 452 Contacts all came over without a hitch. In fact, the couple dozen of contacts with pictures also made it smoothly and when I made a test call from my business line to the iPhone, there was my hyperSven logo. A bit squished in a perfect iPhone made square, altering the actual graphic size, but still, the image made it. Something I figured wouldn’t.
Over all the sync process is slow. After syncing once and trying again to get my Calendar events, Contacts took forever to sync even though not a single change had occurred since the last sync mere minutes before. Unlike when syncing music or video content which displays each file name as it is being synced, Contacts and Calendar simply give the black-and-white motion bar with no detailed information.
Besides hanging Outlook for five minutes, the Calendar issue and slowness of syncing, not bad for 1.0. I hope Apple resolves this issue in the next week with an iTunes update. BTW, I’m still waiting for iTunes to finish up to see if the second full sync got my Calendar.
June 30th, 2007 at 16:32
Cool man. Sounds pretty sweet.
Is there an SSH or RDP client for the phone? I was thinking about getting an 8525 if a few things play out over the next few days and it makes sense for me to stay in touch with an Exchange server as well as need an RDP and SSH client on my phone. I do not really need a video/Mp3 player as a phone, but I do want a key board and an OS that runs apps like Windows Mobile.
June 30th, 2007 at 20:15
So there is no way to synch contacts and calender with Outlook Exchange other than using the cord?
June 30th, 2007 at 22:32
Check out this issue:
Microsoft Solves iPhone E-Mail Flaw
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20070629/tc_pcworld/133600
July 1st, 2007 at 7:30
Shane, I’d use caution when getting the 8525. I’ve had both previous generation of this HTC unit (6600 and 6700) and they both were great for the honeymoon, but man, after that, complete frustration. Mostly due to Microsoft and just a really poor OS. I experienced reboots, random termination of power (that one really got me the first few times!), and hangs. This happens daily! I ended up naming my 6700 “Soft-Reset” since that’s what I do with it daily. Oh ya, battery life? Buy a couple extra, buddy (though the 8525 seems to be vastly improved.)
No, the iPhone doesn’t do RDP and SSH. Once an API is released, I now SSH will be around the corner though I doubt we’ll ever see MS release RDP for the iPhone. But, it’s on OSX, so maybe.
July 1st, 2007 at 7:32
Thank you, Kevin, for the link. Not this fix only is for Exchange 2007 which many are not on. It is also only for the IMAP *mail* feature. It does not do anything for the Contacts or Calendar.
Yes, Brandon, you need the cable to sync your information. No Direct Push is supported.
July 1st, 2007 at 9:01
Thanks for the information Sven. That is a bummer, but better to find out before I sink money into a phone that does not work as it should. The guy that showed me his phone had a huge battery hanging off of it.
Any reccomendations? Not wanting to sink $599.00 into an iPhone, and I kind of want to wait until Revision 2 comes out if I get one at all. Several tech sites are giving the phone good reviews.
So when is your official review coming out?
July 1st, 2007 at 11:16
Ok bro, I have been bragging about my Friend Sven to lots of people telling them to check out SvenOnTech for an iPhone review. So you gotta do it!! Where are some initial photos?
July 1st, 2007 at 16:46
You’re funny, Shane. Give me a couple of days to get real life experience before I go and do any kind of review! But I’ll give you something here in a second…
As to the other phone you were considering, I almost bought it two weeks ago. Like you, I needed a lot of the feature missing from the iPhone. But reading a readers comment on here in a previous iPhone post and how he had the phone and has had nothing but problems with it and based on my past with the HTC models AND other Windows CE-based phones/PDAs, I just couldn’t. I’ve been using Window CE since 1.0 in 1997. In ten years, Microsoft hasn’t been able to improve the operating system. In fact, I think it’s worse! I was just tired of reseting it daily. I’d rather have less features than having a full-featured device not work at all.
July 2nd, 2007 at 16:42
Did you get the Outlook calendar issue resolved? I’m in the same boat. Contacts synced, calendar didn’t.
July 2nd, 2007 at 21:01
No, John, I didn’t. In fact, all day Outlook crashed on me proving to be unusable. Even after an un-install and re-install nothing helped. I did find two keys in the Registry related to iTunes (manufacturer of ALT COM) that I deleted and now I’m back in business. However, I haven’t restarted iTunes since in fear 7.3 is just going to trash it again.
On another note, Entourage ended up getting everything erased in the calendar thanks to the sync to iCal. Since I’m on an Exchange server, everything was lost. I have backed up my OST file and now I have to find a way to import from that since I have no other way of getting back five years of calendar information. Too bad Apple was a bit untruthful on the “Syncs with Entourage” line on its site. Ya, via syncing to iCal. Ugh. What a mess.
July 4th, 2007 at 7:16
I found Outlook crashing all day as well. I actually deleted the Outlook iTunes add-in and Outlook has appeared to stabalize. What a mess!
July 7th, 2007 at 21:31
I had the same issue with outlook crashing everytime i opened it… i deleted the add-in from outlook and then manually added the add-in back in… now outlook crashes once out of 20 times and when it does crash, i choose to not disable the add-in and restart outlook and it works fine… i have no issue synching calendars or contacts… i do run outlook 2007 though, so i dont know how much that affects this experience…
February 26th, 2008 at 3:58
There is a program is working with Outlook-import ost files to outlook,can even move this *.pct file to any other computer, there are no restrictions for it,will help you not to lose this data. The tool can read *.ost files and extract your mails, contacts, tasks and calendars from it,there are two recovery options: information can be extracted, as a list of files in *.eml, *.vcf and *.txt formats, another option consists in exporting of recovered content into a file in *.pst format, that can be easily read by Microsoft Outlook or any other compatible mail client.