Paul Robichaux, one of the Exchange MVPs (who happens to know his way around Entourage very well), posted a great blog post considering the iPhone as a mail device, 3.0 edition. The gist of his post is in his executive summary:
Apple invested a ton of time in the 3.0 release, but most of it went to other aspects of the OS, not into the messaging and calendaring experience.
Paul knows Exchange better than most people, and he's well familiar with Windows Mobile 6.5, so his post has plenty of great details about places where the iPhone shines and where it doesn't.
Oh my! I come from 13+ years in Windows IT and have been using Windows Mobile since the CE days... although I have owned an iPhone 3G for a few months now, there are SO many clear 'missings' coming from Windows Mobile.
Just this morning I went to make a new eMail folders... whoops... can't do that on the iPhone. :/ iPhone v3.0 software just introduced this crazy new interaction experience - it's called "cut and paste". I've not seen anything like it since at least Windows v3.1. ;)
Love the iPhone, but wow I wish there were some middle ground; I still missing simply having my 'Today' screen from WinMo...
Oh, Windows CE. I'm going to get all nostalgic. My first PDA was a Philips Velo, which ran WinCE 2.0.
Heh - yeah... I remember still being in High School and dropping a lot of cash on a US Robotics PalmPilot Professional... and I think I still have it tucked away somewhere.
When my Velo died, I moved over to the Palm Vx. That served me admirably for years, and was later replaced by a Palm Tungsten. But then Palm stopped updating the Palm Desktop for Mac, so I slowly stopped using it (but missed it). I got back into the idea with my first-gen iPhone. I haven't updated to a newer iPhone yet.