Well, I’ve been playing with my iPhone for about a week now, and am impressed overall. Its great as a phone and simple PDA, but the rest of the “productivity” functionality is way behind the times. Most of the issues I’ve found result from the core functional design that cannot be changed (or can only by partially solved) by third party applications.

Granted, its a phone first, and computer second, but my last phone (Palm Treo 700p) seemed to do the job just fine. Despite the smaller screen and less glamour, I felt the Treo was more capable in two big areas (for me):

• Data Storage: Both the Treo, as well as all previous iPods, had the capability of being mounted as a hard drive over USB (and SD Reader). This saved me from having to carry an extra USB/Flash/Thumb Drive. While that’s only a few ounces, the bigger result here is that this problem trickles through all the iPhone applications. This means that (except as read-only) there are no email attachments, web downloads/uploads, and any third party app that would need access to documents (such as an eBook reader) must provide its own proprietary uploader (or web storage). Granted, there are a few third party apps that try to solve this by either mounting over WiFi (DataCase), Web (SugarSync, MiGhtyDocs), or a proprietary uploader (FileMagnet). My testing of all of these solutions shows them as very slow and fairly buggy. Enough to where I would not trust using these as the primary store for a few gigs of documents. Not to mention that they don’t solve the root problem here because the documents are only available in the restricted sandbox of that single application. While Apple has not commented on the reasons behind disabling this functionality, my gut tells me that resource priorities and security concerns have taken precedence over usability. Hopefully over time Apple can provide a solution.

• Office Suite: A sibling to the above problem is that the iPhone does not have an Office Suite. There is no mobile version of Office/iWork/etc. The iPhone does have the capability (and plenty of sandboxed Apps) to display these documents when found in web pages or the third party apps listed above, but cannot edit them. Granted, you would probably not do your main editing on the small screen, but I definitely used my Treo often for touch-up work while on the road. I’ve used the Treo to make last minute changes to Powerpoint presentations, my resume, or Word Doc proposals, etc. This deficiency is visible in both native iPhone Apps and Safari, neither of which support even basic rich text editing (I take lots of notes as RTF’s in TextEdit). Again, I’m guessing that the cost outweighs the benefits for Apple here, but for me this is a big thing.

These issues hit me pretty hard today because I’m off on a quick 1 day business trip this afternoon, and although I won’t need my laptop during my meetings, I’m forced to lug it around just to review a few PDF’s, DOC’s, CHM’s, as well as review and update my RTF notes. I can probably find a combination of various iPhone apps to handle my needs (if i convert my notes to plain text), but I don’t have the time and have come to expect Apple technology to “just work” and not require all these “band-aid” solutions. (And I shouldn’t have to buy yet another device or mini laptop to do this.)