• Synchronisation is not automatic and it needs cable. Once I overcame my problem with iTunes not recognizing my iPhone on my laptop I needed to set up the synchronisation between the device and my agenda/contact (hosted on Outlook). It worked but unfortunately it requires me to plug the device on my laptop and launch the synch manually. The setup with my N95 was just perfect, the synchronisation was done over Bluetooth and scheduled every hour. No need to think about and this how it should be imho.
• SMS, it still takes me more time to write SMS than on my N95 but I love the way SMS are displayed, as a discussion (some application from Nokia Labs, “Conversation”, allowed me to do that but it was installed by default)
• Browsing the web… is awesome! It definitively validates the use of web tablet. iPhone’s browser can handle any webpage but it is much more user friendly to use iPhone (or more generally mobile) adapted website!
• Always connected device. Everything is done to use a maximum of datas online, no wonder the operators like the iPhone. The mapping application for instance will not let me download a set of them locally on my phone as far as I know. Meaning that when travelling abroad I will be forced to use datas network! Nokia Maps lets me upload the datas from my computer.
• The app store is neat,… but I have not found one killing application… too much buzz there!

More later…

Today this message was not very helpful for me, I already knew I was over my quota but I wanted to know by how much… I just needed to know how much the service I am using is going to cost! Simple no ? I do not understand…

On a side note… I dislike the new Swisscom corporate branding.

Improvements:

• QR Code support: once you have the short code (ie numeric code) why not providing the QR Code (or datamatrix) that will lead to this URL.
• SMS services: why not providing the service that sends you the URL by SMS so that you are one click away from accessing the mobile website (send “SCURL 1234″ to number 911 and you get the URL back). Somehow we implemented this with Kaywa and I am trying to do the same with Zong.
• Add tags to an URL/shortcode to make easy discovering of new websites
• Statistics for the community (for instance most visited, last visited websites)

Via Textually

I have tested Zong for one of the blog I am running and I ran into a very unpleasant experience. Zong is a SMS gateway (what is Zong ?) provided by Echovox (based in Geneva) that lets you create your own mobile service for your blog. One of them is an alert system based on the RSS feed (called Z-feed) which seems to be a very good idea (we had worked out something similar at Kaywa for our own blogs). I thought I would give it a try to see how it works and even though I have my ideas for improvement (maybe I’ll come back later on that) it worked fine with my first test: I published something on the blog and a little while afterwards I get a SMS with the title and the content of the post (up to 160 characters of course). Worked fine for the first test but the decond one was a total disaster… I published a post on the blog and after a while I checked my mobile and I get over 40 SMS alerting me of a new post with the very same content. I had to immediately unsubscribe to the alert service as I was still getting SMS. Now this is for me a CHF 10.- experience (CHF 0.20 per SMS) I am not very keen about (not sure how I am going to deal with that yet) but I am glad I tested it before advertising it on the blog. It would be really a pain to deal with the community complaining about all those unwanted SMS they would be charged for.
Too bad the service is not mature. There is nice things to do there… I had already in mind my little RSS hacks to improve the service :-)