It had to happen. Two phones go into the ring, one comes out.

Let's get it started!!

A lot of these differences are based on the variance seen in the Operating Systems. I am not going to differentiate those items. I am also only going to discuss the factors here that make a difference to me. So for factors like size or form-factor (a lot of people complain about the Tilt's bulk, but I do not care how big my workday phone is), where the issue does not concern me one way or the other, it will go unmentioned. Have at it!!!

5 Interface surfaces - as mentioned earlier today, the Tilt offers you several different ways to input data. The iPhone? Just one.

Keyboard - if you make an error on the iPhone, you'll be going back to either entirely re-enter the entry, or start over with a new entry, or backspace over your error. Although I will admit that it is easier to type in portrait mode (iPhone) than in landscape mode (the only way to type on the Tilt's slide-out keyboard, although you have the option of hand-writing recognition to moderately compensate). On the Tilt, you can use your stylus to select text right away by drag-selecting your selection, and then choosing to cut, paste, or edit that string...just like in any desktop operating system.

Customizable Desktop - the Tilt's desktop is a lot more customizable than the iPhone's. While it was cool when Apple introduced the abilit to have multiple pages in your dashboard and move your widgets around, you still can not have anything other than a dashboard with a bunch of square widgets placed differently. With the Tilt, there are several Today-screen customizations you can select from. Plus all of the free themes available on the 'net. While the system is not that much more open than the iPhone's, it is one that I prefer.

Connectivity SA - it is pretty easy to tell the status of your connection on the iPhone, both with BlueTooth and cellular. Not so with the Tilt. It may just be that I do not understand the icons just yet, but as far as I can tell, there is no way that you can know whether or not you have lost your Bluetooth connection to your headset. You can pull down the health of the current Bluetooth transmitter, which is lumped in with all of the other wireless connection data (cellular and Wi-Fi) in a bubble available as a pop-up off the top ribbon bar. The bubble does not really tell you whether or not a device is actually connected, though. I will say that I have not yet lost my connection to the headset. I have been forcing myself to push the I believe button and initiate calls on the Tilt without checking the connection and in each case audio has come through the earpiece.

Email Attachments - for whatever reason, the Tilt seems to handle email attachments a lot better. First in that they do not take all day to download, even when I am only connected via Edge. I tried downloading an email with the photos from the canoe trip on the iPhone both before and after I had its service disconnected. Pulling the file down over EDGE was basically impossible. It did complete over Wi-Fi. While the email came down, the attachment icons were unpopulated; they were just squares that said "IMG-1560.jpg". I tapped on them to then download each photo individually (there is no automated way to download all attachments in an email that I could find on the iPhone) to start them downloading. In two days of trying, I was never able to get them to download. When I sent them to the Tilt, they all downloaded, were viewable, and I could even play the two videos that I had shot off that camera card. Every single one of them (attachments) actually opens. And they can all be saved. [I can also copy and paste, or save image content from the internet, which the iPhone does not let you do]. While you can open some number of attachments on the iPhone, Apple does not allow you to save them anywhere, which pulls any comment on the advantages of the iPhone's huge memory capacity in comparison to the Tilt's into the realm of questionable validity. I think I prefer to pay to buy aftermarket memory cards that I can store anything I want to on.

Other Comments:

I found out that there are two different Opera browsers for small devices: Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. The Mobile variant is the one you have to pay for. Mini is free. While you can not pinch and swipe like you can on the iPhone, there is a zoom button, and the browser loads pages much faster than Safari, even on Edge. You can open new windows, just like you can in Safari, and when you go back to a previous Window, you can read the page as it is. It does not reload like Safari does unless you need to tell it to.

There would be a lot of people who would bring up the iPhone's Google-Powered Map application as an advantage. But there is Google Maps for the Tilt, too, and it does interface and use the Tilt's GPS antenna. More importantly, Windows Live Search (WLS), a free donload, also uses the GPS to provide the same search nearby, route to/from here, and location triangulation features that Maps does. It has Weather and the wweather automatically pulls from your current GPS location, vice the iPhone's weather app which requires you to manually enter the desired weather location, although it has an advantage in being able to tab several locations for the weather pull. To get multiple weather locations on the Tilt's Windows Live Search, you have to launch the browser link to the actual Weather website.

The coolest thing about WLS? I stumbled across it yesterday while driving in Oakland. I had a route programmed in from the Homewood Suites in the Embarcadero, where I had a 5pm meeting, and my actual hotel in Berkeley. I made a wrong turn. I told the app to center on GPS, and then re-route from here. When I started moving again, the app commenced tracking my car (I could actually see myself moving) and pinged me with audible updates when I was approaching my next turn. Awesome!!! I never got a chance to check out the iPhone 3G's new Maps functionality since that model also has a GPS receiver (my 1st generation iPhone did not). There is a chance that its functionality is just as cool.

I may not have specifically mentioned it, but the Tilt's version of WMDC allows syncing with Microsoft Outlook Notes, which was a instigator to my eventual move to trade it with the Motorola Q I originally bought to replace the iPhone.

My end-state evaluation is this: the iPhone is not a smart phone, and perhaps trying to employ it as such caused me to set different expectations than I should have had. Look it up on any tech site, and you will not find it grouped with the other smart phones. It will be listed as an MP3 phone, Video phone, or Multimedia or media phone. The same is true even on the AT&T site, which does not group the iPhone with the Motorola Q or the Tilt, or the Blackberry Line of phones. I tried tracking down how people are using it [the iPhone] in the corporate world and their thoughts on it, but no joy, other than people complaining about its limited security features.

The things that my iPhone does well are not things that I need it to do well every day. I had used the iPod functionality maybe four times. My usage of it was hampered by the fact that play automatically resumes if it was interrupted by a phone call, which in my case sometimes resulted in explicit lyrics being blared out in the office before I could get my headphones back in. It is a great media player and specifically a great video player. I used it on the flight to watch some of my iTunes episodes of Rosewell. Its display is better than my iPod's for watching video, and I have always disliked using up cell phone battery power for media apps, especially watching video. For the time being, I am keeping the phone, vice selling it to someone on eBay who wants it so that they can jailbreak it. It will be used as an iPod Touch for viewing movies, and obtaining web content via Wi-Fi.

While I am staying on my Sony Ericsson w580i Walkman cell as my secondary, weekend phone for right now, it is not outside the realm of possibility that I will eventually roll my family plan to the Tilt and the iPhone at the turn of the year. I want some time to capture the nicety of being able to use the microSD cards that are common to both the Tilt and the 580i for dual-use of files across the two phones, especially MP3s and pictures. But having both the Tilt and the iPhone up and with service would allow me some more in-depth time comparing and contrasting their capabilities head-to-head on a day-to-day basis.

So far I am very happy with the Tilt. Battery life is bad, or at least not optimal. But so is the iPhone's. And with the Tilt, I can always carry a spare battery and pop it in, something the iPhone can not do. Plus, the battery meter in the Tilt is a percentage indicator, not a graphic with no number tied to it that does not establish what the battery life remaining really is. A downside I discovered in practical use yesterday is that, when using the GPS applications on the Tilt, I have to:

a. set the screen brightness much higher to be able to see the screen in the sunlight with my sunglasses on, further draining battery power

b. set the phone to never go to sleep or turn off the display so I do not have to fumble with buttons to turn the screen back on while I am driving if I do not look at the directions for some time, again, further draining battery power

Another minor issue is that I seem to be faster setting up my calendar in Outlook than I am in OS X. Of course, all of the applications for PIM sync on my Toshiba are embedded in one place, Outllook. Whereas on the MacBook, you have iCal, Address Book, and Mail. Not as slick a package. And I never did like the very lightly, pastel-like color patterns of Excel in OS X. It makes it difficult to see what cell you are working in, and I use a few Excel files to copy and paste stuff out of into PIM files.

I am not going on record as saying that the iPhone is a bad product. It can not be, because I sang its praises both here and elsewhere for several months. It was so good that I was willing to put up with some of the aforementioned issues for several months. But what I will say is that everyone needs to consider all of the alternatives and not just make a 2-year cell-phone contract based on the trend of popular opinion. Had I opened my mind to considering other options rather than thinking of the iPhone as the automatic, sole-source for my smart-phone replacement back in January, I may never have gotten here.

Until next time, take care.

- Vr/GulliverJR.