Since I wrote part 1 of this iPhone overdose article, I’ve been to two conferences that REALLY tested the iPhone. Here is how it did in each of the areas listed in part 1:

Was it up to the challenge of supporting all of my essential sales tasks while on the road?

1) Email:

What I predicted: Gmail = good, Outlook mail = short term OK, longer term fail.

What I experienced: Gmail worked like a champ. Outlook mail arrived on time, but I had no email history, as it is stored in the .pst file on my laptop, not on a server. Sadly, I predicted this one accurately. Apple has work to do to make email a non-hassle. Expecting outlook users to have no history might be OK for personal use, but not for business use. I can deal with it for a couple of days to get me through a conference, but no longer.

2) Skype:

What I predicted: fail.

What I experienced: Although I read somewhere that the restriction on VOIP over 3G had been lifted by Apple/AT&T, the Skype app still limits VOIP to wifi. Wifi at conferences is always notoriously unreliable, so the Skype app was useless to me. Good thing my call with Australia got rescheduled! Fail.

3) Presentation aid:

What I predicted: fail.

What I experienced: My first 3 attempts at opening my powerpoint deck on the iPhone were sub-optimal. Missing images, images oriented incorrectly, no animation. In short, not useable. Then I loaded the deck in google docs and found that it was 95% true to the original. The 5% that was missing were things I could live with. I actually ended up with a useable sales aid, although a very small one. Because of the small screen size, I never attempted to use this sales aid. Apple = fail, Google Docs = success.

4) Browser:

What I predicted: Ok, but fail on flash sites.

What I experienced: Unfortunately, it was OK for quickly looking up a company website to get an idea what they do before talking to their rep. The lack of flash isn’t a huge detriment with most corporate websites. However, NHL.com is heavily dependent on flash, which was a problem for me. I am at a complete loss that Apple hasn’t addressed this yet. Baffling. FAIL.

5) Twitter:

What I predicted: success via tweetdeck and hootsuite.

What I experienced: two conferences, one month apart, different result. Tweetdeck was great for the first conference. I set up a group of key folks to follow and a search for the conference’s hash tag. Cool… until my battery was going dead after about 3 hours. That was shocking. By the time the second conference arrived Twitter had introduced lists, and I was making a list for the conference. There aren’t any tools yet to manage lists, let along on the iPhone. I also switched to TwitBird, as TweetDeck only seemed to get search results when it was open. TwitBird would allow me to refresh and get all the tweets that went out while I had the app turned off. I also used hootsuite on my laptop before leaving for the conference to schedule a series of tweets. That kept me from having to tweet as much, and saved my battery a bit. I’ll call this a success, although the apps could be better.

6) Calendar:

What I predicted: success on much needed calendar function.

What I experienced: Neither conference thought ahead and provided the event schedule as an iCal (or similar) file. For the first one I did nothing and relied on a paper schedule. I really did not like that. For the second, I input the schedule in Outlook, which I sync with my google calendar … and I scheduled a tweet 5 minutes before each event. This way I would be able to share my efforts with all attendees that were following the event’s hash tag stream. I found that I never looked at my outlook calendar, did use the tweets to keep me on track, and pulled out the paper schedule a few times as well. The iPhone did it’s job. Success.

7) GPS:

What I predicted: great hardware rendered nearly useless by crippled apps. Fail.

What I experienced: Crippled as the apps are, they still were very useful at getting me where I needed to go, both driving and walking. I’m incredibly annoyed that the iphone Map app doesn’t work like a car GPS (real time ETA, TTS, onboard maps). The experience could have been SOOOOOO much better, but I was able to make do. Thought this would be a resounding FAIL, turned out to be an annoyance laced success.

8) CRM:

What I predicted: small screen success.

What I experienced: Never could get the data that I wanted when I wanted it. Gave up on PLD at the first conference and never looked back. Thanks for trying, PipeLineDeals, but it just didn’t cut it for me. Given the screen size, the iPhone did OK.

9) Phone:

What I predicted: seamless success.

What I experienced: Insufficient volume. Spotty coverage. Thanks Apple and AT&T for serving me the double whammy. They should call it the iToy, since the phone function appears to be an afterthought. Fail.

10) LinkedIn:

What I predicted: manageable.

What I experienced: I manage a group on LinkedIn called Affiliate Marketing for eMerchants (if you are an eMerchant, you should join!). But I didn’t do any group management while on the road. The LinkedIn app is useless, and the screen too small to use the tools via the browser. Fail.

Ok, what did I miss?

I had hoped to make the trips sans-laptop. For the first conference, I also had an offsite meeting scheduled with a client and had to take the laptop for a presentation. I never took the laptop out of the bag for the latest conference, but that is because I was able to go home at night and do my critical online tasks there. Had I been away from home I would have had to take the laptop along. Sad to report that the iPhone just isn’t up to replacing the laptop for conferences… at least not for me.

Jeff Cress: the Sales Guy
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