Drinking the Kool-Aid

Even after the warning I gave myself previously, I ditched my old BlackBerry for a shiny new iPhone. I was partly motivated by the lack of love shown by Vodafone UK despite the gargantuan phone and data roaming bills but mostly I've become one of those sad people who use Apple to project a 'non-corporate' personality.

A week into the new regime my fear is that even once I'm through the usual teething problems (as when I switched from PalmPilot to BlackBerry) I'm going to be left with a system that is more focused on convincing me that Life Is Fun! than helping me get my work done.

First impressions: the Cloud / MobileMe set-up does exactly what it said it would so my Mac and iPhone sync in an eerily seamless manner. It's also amazingly cool how the the iPhone Googlemaps function works out where I am and how to get to any address in my database. All great and precisely what mates showed me when they were prosetylising for Steven Jobs.

Rather, it's that when Apple's beautifully shot promo pieces show you all the cool stuff your new kit can do, they don't go on to say that's about all it's can do without a lot of angst. Googlemaps isn't a proper GPS, I've yet to work out how to wrangle the iPhone into playing nicely with non-.mac email and, strangely, non-Mac apps like Things (a To Do list programme) don't synch in the same way that Mac's own software does.

And if one more person asks me if I've downloaded the 'pour a virtual beer' application I'll not be held responsible for my actions.