I love Dilbert because Scott Adams can so quickly summarise so many of the frustrations in my day to day work. Take this comic for example:

How many times do you get called out to meetings where they are just talking about planning to do the work when you stop and think - I could have actually just done it myself in the time it takes to plan! I am all for taking a cautious approach when it comes to sensitive projects but there needs to be some common sense around it as well. I think I need to plan for a meeting to discuss the creation of an appropriate project sizing methodology for when to use a committee planning approach rather than just going ahead and getting the project done. I’ll just schedule that some time in between meetings.

After a couple of weeks with the iphone I was really disappointed with the battery life. I thought that with the new firmware that it would be able to stretch out the battery life quite considerably. I carry around a blackberry at the same time and am used to the performance on that tool (3 days standby and it generally pulls down email quicker than I get it on my mac). However I was getting significantly less battery life on the iphone and would frequently have to charge it up during the day. At night I would just leave it on the charging station.

I also found that I was using significant amounts of data. After the first two weeks I had used around 220MB out of my miserly 250MB per month. After I saw that I immediately switched the iphone to not pull data down off exchange and put it onto a half hourly fetch cycle.

Once I did this I noticed a marked improvement in battery life. Even with fairly active calling I don’t really see much drain on the battery! I wonder, therefore, how aggressively the iPhone is calling back to exchange to see if there is any mail waiting for it. The data traffic now is also extremely low - even with 30 minute polls I have only done 1.2MB today (no browsing traffic) which is a lot better than before.

Keep discovering new apps for the phone - downloaded fring, bloomberg, aroundme, tomizone, igolf and ibowl the other day so it is definitely still keeping me amused. By far the most heavily used application is eReader. I love being able to take books everywhere without needing to lug around the big trade paperbacks etc so this was a must have application for me. It is a pity that mobipocket hasn’t hooked onto the iphone bandwagon yet as I have quite a few books on their platform that I wouldn’t mind transferring over.

I have finally succumbed and have bought an iPhone. After the initial euphoria at having rejoined Jobs’ reality distortion zone I have started playing with some of the applications.

Some of my new favourites now that I have an always on connection include twinkle (a localised twitted client), linkedin, facebook, face melter (an awesome little application that lets you mess with photos), shazam (never wonder what that song that is playing is again!) and of course wordpress.

I still don’t think that the iPhone is quite ready for the enterprise but it I’d close. I think that they just need to fix up the global search and the mail application (starting with collapsible mail folders!) and they would have my vote.

Also spent a bit of time activating the phone to my developer certificates. When I get some more time I hope to actually start writing some applications!