Its been a while since I’ve posted, I’ve been away for a few weeks holiday, during which I upgraded from my Nokia N95 to my new iPhone 16GB 3GS…and what a difference its made to my life!

Those who know me know that upgrading my phone is never cheap, as I have to buy two (one for me and one for my wife Ceri who will moan like crazy if I just upgraded the one!) – this was well worth paying for.

O2 shop was busy, so we simply strolled into the Carphone Warehouse shop in Swindon town centre, they were very helpful and half and hour later, some very useful advice from the nice lady in the shop and also configuring her work email account on her iPhone for her, we walked away with iPhones!

As many know, you then spend best part of 4 hours configuring them, there were a few tears with joining them onto my home Wireless LAN (I run 4 secure WLANs – quite geeky really, giving the iPhones their own unique wireless zone). Never the less, this was completed and then comes the great part – the Apps store!

I’ve never seen Ceri spend so much time with a phone, I think she managed to download most of the free apps very quickly, and just like me, she couldn’t resist the temptation to start “twittering” and now uses the iPhone all the time for email, txt, twitter, shopping lists, you name it, its on her iPhone!

So bye-bye PC – never use that anymore, hello iPhone – only slight “niggle” I have with it is I have to go through the menu system to turn on and off the Bluetooth for my car kit – why can’t Apple release a nice simple button / app to turn this on and off without me having to “Jailbreak” my iPhone…I don’t think I’m prepared to do this just yet…

For now its back to Twitter, these things are so addictive…. http://www.twitter.com/darrencrannis

PS – has great tools for IT users too…not got round to using these yet!

So you may ask why not go for a “Blackberry” – personally I’m not a huge fan of these – the BIS (Blackberry Internet Service) is poor, to get the most out of them you really need a BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) – and this transforms them into a really sharp business tool – but comes at a price and requires its own separate physical or virtual (better option) server (do not bolt this onto your Exchange server!!)

The E71 is a good phone – it comes with “Mail for Exchange” – which is easy (ish!) to configure by following the Nokia Mail for Exchange (MfE) Guide – what it doesn’t tell you is you have one opportunity of getting this right, otherwise if you come out of the settings you can’t get back into them and you have to factory default the phone via plugging it into your Laptop / PC and reloading the firmware and software – or as I found out on a forum later, type in *#7370# followed by the factory security code 12345 – and start again.

If you are thinking of buying an E71 – please do, only do configure your MfE first, when it asks for your Exchange Server (Exchange 2003 SP1 and Exchange 2007 SP1 required) make sure you type in your Public-Facing Mail Domain (e.g. mail.yourdomain.com) get this working and then add all your contacts and features!

If you are thinking of mobilising your business – please get in touch and see how I can help you.

The iPhone 3.0 Software Update includes some great new features, as well as all the features from previous updates. iPhone 3.0 also lets you run the next generation of iPhone apps, like peer-to-peer games and much more, the key updates (and improvements are):

Cut, Copy & Paste – finally copy and send text messages, as well as text and images from the web!
Landscape Keyboard
MMS – Send MMS messages, including video.
Voice Memos
Improved Calendar

and interestingly this a feature called “Internet Tethering” – is the a “modem”….maybe…

…and much, much more, plus the usual improvements and refinements to the current applications…

The upgrade is FREE, visit the Apple iPhone UK software update website for more details.