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I am tired of waiting for the ultimate Windows Mobile Phone in the US. Meanwhile everyone else is enjoying the benefits of iPhone. Two of my friends who were waiting for the coolest Windows Mobile phone had already switched to iPhone. None of us like the closed platform that Apple provides. But Windows Mobile doesn’t seem to be delivering on its potential. Microsoft’s dependence on mobile phone manufacturers doesn’t seem to be working. I know they acquired one, but there is no news about what their plans are and such.

Today I went ahead and purchased the 8GB black iPhone 3G. Right now it is syncing with iTunes on my Vista machine. It looks like iTunes is frozen because it is not responding to my mouse clicks. I never liked iTunes anyway. Compared to Windows Media Player 10/11, it is pretty primitive. I hate the way it moves around files on my computer. iPhone says the sync is in progress but I doubt it. I do not have too many files to sync.

As for the hardware, these are little things I have noticed. iPhone has one of the best designed chargers I have ever seen. It is just a small cube that plugs in to a power outlet with a USB port on the other end. I completely dislike the custom cable required to connect the iPhone to anything else. I am glad that they provide a cable with the phone unlike old Motorola phones where you had to purchase a cable and then you got the software along with the cable. Motorola already switched to standard USB cables like most of the rest of the world.

I don’t know yet the quality of 3G, but even without update to software version 2.0.2, the Internet access speed was good. I just updated to the latest version. I didn’t know that the download size was almost a quarter of a gigabyte. The best updates I have seen are from Microsoft where the updates are not like the entire OS.

Even though the iPhone 3G had been out for almost a month now, there was a line to get it in the AT&T store. Not too long but everyone had to wait like 30 minutes to an hour. With all the recession and all, I was not expecting the line for a phone. I am not sure if this is how it is always done, but the AT&T was only able to transfer my contacts to SIM card and then that SIM card to the iPhone. Other data like ring tones, pictures etc were not transferred in store.

The quality of Apple movie downloads are only near DVD quality. I would not bother to download them. But Microsoft has nothing right now and Apple well may start HD content before Microsoft even comes to this market. Cinemanow has been doing Movie downloads for ages now at a better quality but they did not market it well. The sound quality on these downloads are also poor at Dolby Surround. These movies are good enough for portable devices but definitely not for a media center.

My preferences are for true 1080i/p movies with Dolby Digital sound. WMV had the potential but Microsoft is slow as usual. From the T2 days things haven’t changed much. My experience with T2 extreme edition DVD was quite bad and never went back to WMV. I consider myself as a techie and could not get it to work without some tinkering.

I never had an Apple product but I have been thinking about a laptop after they went Intel. If Apple makes the HD move first, I might jump to Apple camp. I have had a big screen HDTV for 3 years now and am frustrated about lack of true HD content. Initially I had Dish network with HD receiver and now I have Comcast with HD receiver and they are good.

I don’t mind downloading HD content over my Comcast connection which is pretty fast. I download tons of stuff including Vista builds that about 3 gig over this connection. There definitely is a market for such content but these companies are not willing to make real improvements in user experience.