Most mobile phones are designed to be used on their own. They have very simple internal operating systems that perform a limited range of tasks, and need little or no maintenance. This harks back to the days of the earliest telephones — when they were much larger devices than even the chunkiest modern-day mobile — which did little more than make calls and, if you were lucky, tell you who was calling.
Few even had anything so technological as a built-in phone book, so the idea of music playback, integrated email and route planning with satellite photography did not even enter their designers' minds.
Unfortunately, few mobile phones have moved beyond this era, and although some come bundled with software for limited integration with a full-sized computer, few are designed to be used as anything other than a standalone device.
That is where the iPhone is different: it is the first phone designed from the ground up to be a fully fledged PC and Mac companion, and work equally as well as an ultra-portable, hand-held computer. For this reason, it integrates closely with iTuncs, Apple's free music organisation software, whose ever-expanding functions make its name less accurate by the day.
Whenever you dock your iPhone, it will appear in the list of connected devices in iTuncs' sidebar, along with your music and video library, podcast listings and so on. This is much the same as an iPod would do, and clicking on its name will give you a similar range of functions, presenting you with a tabbed interface through which you can control manual or automatic synchronisation of your contacts, music, videos, podcasts and photos.
While the original iPhone shipped with a Dock to facilitate this operation, the iPhone 3G's Dock is an optional extra, and not bundled in the box. You may see this as cost cutting, as you do still get a cable for transferring your music, videos and television programmes, and which connects to the bundled power adapter for charging the battery, but Apple would prefer you to synchronise your data using the MobileMe service and only use iTunes for movies and music This replaced the ageing .
Mac users with a copy of iLife can use the suite's iPhoto application to manage photos taken on the iPhone and transferred using the bundled cable.
The benefit to you is that you always have the most up-to-date set of data at your fingertips, wherever you happen to need it. The benefit to Apple is that it can charge an additional £59 a year for providing the service, which you should factor into your calculations when considering the purchase price of the iPhone and monthly contract fees when deciding whether it is the right phone for you.
MobileMe is by no means a compulsory add-on, though, and you can still synchronise your data manually, in the same way you would with an iPod by using the included cable and iTunes software. However, as iTunes itself only handles music, videos and podcasts, you will need to make sure that you arc using the appropriate third-party helper applications for organising your contacts and photos.
If you are a Mac user, you have by far the simplest choice: you stick with the Apple defaults of iPhoto for photos and Address Book for contacts. Do note, however, that while Address Book is bundled with the operating system, Mac OS X, iPhoto is part of the ever-expanding iLife suite, which costs an additional £55 (£69 for the family edition). The only other way to obtain a legal cop)- is to buy a new Mac, in which case it will be pre-installed. If you have an old edition of iLife, you may need to upgrade, as the iPhone requires at least iPhoto 4.0.3 or later.
PC users have a wider choice of applications. Contacts can be stored in Yahoo! Address Book, Outlook Express, Outlook and Windows Address Book, while photos can be managed through either Photoshop Album 2.0 or later, or Photoshop Elements 3.0 or later, both from Adobe.
However, the iPhone is designed to be more than just a transportation and playback device for your media, with its synchronisation features expanding to encompass browser bookmarks (from Safari on the Mac, and Safari and Internet Explorer on the PC), and your email account settings (from Mail on the Mac, and Outlook or Outlook Express on the PC). Note, though, that if you transfer your email settings you will copy only the information the iPhone needs to know before it can gain access to the server; you will not actually transfer any of your mail messages themselves.
The range of applications compatible with the iPhone shows up some inconsistencies in the way Apple has implemented various features on the device, for while it will happily synchronise with an Entourage address book, it will not draw in Entourage email settings on the Mac. The situation is similar, although not quite the same when it comes to calendars. PC-hosted iPhones will read Outlook calendars, yet on the Mac they will only read calendars administered by iCal - not those overseen by Entourage. There is fortunately a workaround here in that by linking your Entourage and iCal calendars, so that Entourage events appear on Apple's default calendaring application, you will see that entries posted in Entourage arc automatically transferred to the iPhone at each sync.
As the term synchronisation suggests, changes are often two-way affairs, with as much information passing from the iPhone to the computer, as from the computer to the iPhone. Fortunately, this interchange has been intelligently implemented, with the iPhone interface software recognising that at times the host computer will need to maintain its existing settings, regardless of what you do remotely to their copies on the iPhone.
Changes made to an email account on the iPhone do not, therefore, affect the status of the account on the host computer, thus allowing you to specify that the iPhone should leave all messages on the server, whether downloaded or not, allowing you to download a permanent second copy at a later point for archiving on your main computer.
By default, all cable-based synchronisation with a Mac or PC will be done manually, so that every time you connect your iPhone to your computer you will have to instigate the synchronisation with the click of a button. It is far easier to authorise iTunes to do this itself, without further reference to yourself, by connecting your iPhone, clicking its entry in iTunes' left-hand sidebar and then clicking on the Summary tab. Check the box beside Automatically sync when this iPhone is connected and your data on your iPhone and computer will always match.
The option below, to Only sync checked items relates to iTunes content, allows you to tick off the music, podcasts and so on that you want to take with you and leave the boxes beside your B-list tracks cleared to prevent them from transferring.
If you frequently connect your iPhone to your computer as a means of charging it, perhaps because you keep the adaptor plug at home but connect by USB with you get to the office, there will more than likely be times when you want to connect it only to charge the battery, and not to swap any data. If you have authorised iTunes to automatically sync your devices, you will therefore want to prevent it from running away with itself. In this instance, pre-empt matters by starting iTunes in advance of plugging in your iPhone, and then hold the Command and Alt (also commonly called Option) keys on the Mac, or the Control and Shift keys on the PC as you connect the iPhone to the computer. iTunes will now ignore the iPhone, and while it will not mount, it will still receive charge.
MobileMe makes it easy to sync your data over the mobile phone network or a wifi access point. It also has a web-based front-end so that even when you are away from your computer or iPhone, you can access your calendar, contacts and email. The service, which works with both Macs and PCs, costs £59 per year.
Apple bundled a Dock with the first edition of the iPhone, which greatly facilitated cable-based charging and syncing. This was not included with the iPhone 3G. However, it remains an optional extra at £29 for either the standard or dual version, which will also charge the optional Bluetooth headset.
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