I’ve used the iPhone a little in Apple stores, and the interface is leaps and bounds above ‘old style’ Symbian interfaces. I love using SIP, internet radio, voice commands on Symbian, and T-Mobile’s unlimited data tarriff is very nice.

What I hate about Symbian is that the interface is slow and non-intuitive (I know my way around now, but from a human interfaces point of view it’s poor). The web browser on N80 was horrible, very slow, hard to navigate, hard to type in… many pages didn’t work properly. On E90 it was faster and websites generally seemed to work better. Apparently the E71 browser is comparable to E90 but unfortunately it’s still nowhere near the iPhone’s browser.

Currently I go on websites on a mobile phone to find information when I have no reasonable alternative, like, searching cinema times when I’m out but not at the cinema. It’s something I avoid doing if at all possible, but it doesn’t have to be like that in this day and age.

3rd party applications are my main reason for not going the iPhone route at the moment. I like to put IRC, radio, jabber client on my phone. Apple have encouraged developers to create apps for their platform far better than Nokia, so with a fast expanding library of applications, my next phone after I tire of my E71 may well be an iPhone. But then again, I’m really looking forward to using the E71′s blackberry-style QWERTY keypad. We’ll see.

As a footnote… PocketPC… don’t bother O.o