As my trusty Nokia E71 got lost/stolen I had to get a new Phone. I didn’t wanna go back to a non-smartphone so I looked at what they had in stores at Zhongguancun Tech Market. Narrowing it down to either an iPhone or an HTC Android device, I finally went with an iPhone 3G 16GB (as the HTC Hero wasn’t on sale yet). The price was about €100 cheaper than in Germany for a fully legal unlocked Hong Kong version.

After several weeks I feel I can safely say I don’t regret my decision. Battery life is better than expected (at least here on GSM) and the nice screen makes reading news and the occasional website finally possible without headaches. I don’t have to tell anything about the famously great handling and the vast choice of apps in the App Store, but I would like to recommend some apps that make my everyday life easier:

• fring (free): Although I think Nimbuzz (free) is the better IM client, I use fring because it’s more stable (Nimbuzz crashes quite often) and offers push for 1 hour (Nimbuzz offers up to 30 min). On the other hand Nimbuzz has landscape mode, push can be configured (not only off, but 5, 15, 30 min) and has a better overall feel to it.
• Milpon (free): Simply shows you your todo lists for RTM and lets you add new items, too. No need for a premium account. Just synchronizing can be slow at times, not sure if that’s the app’s problem though.
• AccuWeather (free): Best weather app with 15 hour and 15 day forecast plus lots and lots of extras.
• Read it Later (free version): Used this even before as a firefox extenssion to mark pages for reading later or even offline. This helps especially if you’re on a volume based data contract or have no reception in your local subway. I just download all my news on WiFi before I leave the house and read them while commuting

Changing to an iPhone also made me finally want to make the step over from POP to IMAP on my mail account. GMX had sent me an invitation to try their pro service (which cost about €3 a month and enables IMAP support), but after trying for an hour, I realized it was pretty slow and as Gmail has IMAP and even a bigger inbox for free I finally decided to move all my mail over to my till then more or less idle Gmail account. My old accounts will still be fetched by Gmail, but I try to get at least the more important mails directly there. This move made me also close my always-open Outlook – not for good but at least for most of the time. Calendar has been moved to Google Calendar (but will by synced) and can be nicely integrated into Gmail (RTM has a nice gadget for that, too, btw). So now the only thing I really use Outlook for is my Contacts, cause Google Contacts is still not good enough imho. Not sure if I should maybe just go with some other Client, that maybe syncs better with Google’s services – Zimbra maybe? Just need to keep the easy syncing with my iPhone. Any ideas anyone?

But I really gotta say, these two changes (which also made me start using RTM) really made me keep up on my everyday schedule a lot faster and better. So maybe I should start to make more use of my time and maybe also get my ass up and train some more!