iPhone 3G is a cool phone on the market but when I finally decided to get a new phone and didn’t choose iPhone, many asked why and here are my reasons. First a few points on what I do with my phone:

• Manage my life.  One look at the home screen and I know what’s up for the day
• Triage (work & personal) emails. Mostly delete and quick/emergency replies
• Access/Manage my contacts which syncs with Outlook which in turn syncs with plaxo.com
• Access the web for quick info, price comparison when standing in a store etc.

Let review each phone (or rather OS) and what I like/dislike about them:

iPhone

I disliked:

• When replying to a work (exchange) email on the iPhone, it doesn’t show up as replied to in Outlook on the PC.
• You can’t flag messages like follow-up etc.
• Have to tell the mail client which account to send the message “from”. No default send account can be set.
• Switching between mail accounts required ~5 taps
• It syncs mail whenever it wants to.  I had personal mail set to sync manually.  It syncs when you open the mail client.  (I didn’t tell it to do that!)
• In contacts, the search wasn’t anchored at the top.  If I happened to be at Zach Zimmerman, I would have to scroll to the top to search for Buck Brown.  Not cool.
• It syncs ALL contacts folders in your mailbox – specifically it sync’d the folder I didn’t want on my phone, and I had no way to control it.
• Calendar – you can’t:
  • Create a request and invite others
  • Create a recurring meeting
  • Color things based on type (personal, etc)
  • Do free/busy
  • Change time zone of meetings
• Tasks – doesn’t sync from Exchange – not that I use them.
• Notes – doesn’t sync Notes folder from Exchange. Don’t really use those either.
• No Home Screen!  Looking at the home screen shows a ton of cool things to do: Facebook-which rules, iTunes, Safari-a browser that actually works well on a mobile device, and so many more.  Problem is the clock is miniscule and I had no idea what time my next meeting was unless I clicked into the calendar.
• Battery life – horrible – not even 1 full day.
• No Picture Text Messaging (MMS)
• No tactile keyboard – touching the screen keyboard was decent for typing.  I am way faster on WM keyboard devices.
• No video cam – not that important, but sometimes useful for a good joke or a concert clip.
• No copy/paste.
• No SD slot – makes transferring data more difficult.

Things I LOVED about the iPhone:

• INTERFACE – if you haven’t played with an iPhone, you are missing out.  The touch screen simply rules.  Nothing in WM comes close in my opinion. (Not even the Touch which has a cool home screen, then switches out to the standard WM interface inside an app.)
• Safari – their web browser actually allowed you turn surf the web. Interesting concept – WM take notice! (ps-we are making IE6 available to WM devices later this year.. should be a HUGE help)
• Built in GPS – very nice.  Google maps works perfectly and is very smooth and easy to use. (I realize we have Live for WM)
• Accelerometor – when you flip the device, the screen flips into landscape/portrait.  That’s nice.  (WM requires you to open the keyboard to do this.)
• Applications – the social aspect of the device simply rocks.  facebook, youtube, and so many other cool/useful tools (for social/personal use)
• I could tell it to always use First Last when creating/sorting Contacts.
• I never had to reboot the device once because it flaked out.
• It never ran out of memory
• Coolness factor

Nokia E71

Dislikes:

• Small non touch screen
• you can’t reply-all to everyone on an exchange appointment (if you are late) – same as iphone
• Very basic exchange features (worse than iphone in some areas)
• Symbian can be as user friendly as unix, menu system is not always friendly or intuitive.

Likes:

• Radio
• Podcast over 3G – awesome and can’t get it on iphone
• Very slim profile – I have to feel which pocket I have it in sometimes since its so slim and light
• Battery – goes without the need for charge for 2-3 days with moderate surfing and regular email download.
• Good GPS – that is not picky and get signal even in pretty covered areas (like driving in a car)
• Stable – have not had to reboot.
• Nice tactile keyboard – makes life easier when typing

Overall, very happy with my E71 and no regrets so far, although lack of good integration with exchange does sometimes make me start considering going back to windows mobile device, but until I find something that is good enough (HTC HD is the only possible candidate so far), I am not going to bother.