UKmacman, I've always wondered about this so please honestly tell me....
I'll take my stab, but I'll also be very interested to hear his answer...a couple of these things are things that might have been changed in FW2.0, but most of them I'm pretty sure have not.
- Although the BB only shows text e-mail, it downloads all of it automatically -- so you don't have to worry about whether you have service when you want to read an e-mail, whereas with the iPhone, it says you have three new e-mails, and you maybe can't read them and have to walk down the hall a bit until you're back in service to read them.
- I find so far that the BB is much closer to flawless in terms of always trying to check and get e-mail whenever brief intervals of service exist, whereas at least with 1.1.4, I've found that the iPhone at least occasionally gets confused, e.g. when it thinks it's still in a wifi spot but you've walked away somewhere else, and then you look at your inbox and it hasn't checked for new e-mail in several hours, even though it was told to do so every fifteen minutes. (fixed?)
For both of those, I guess some people are in places where, even inside buildings, they never have service blackout pockets... I personally run into it a lot, particularly inside buildings, so having that is really valuable to me.
- BB allows for different signatures and filters and so on for different accounts -- more flexibility in this area if you have seven or eight e-mail accounts on it, like I do (fixed in 2.0, I believe?)
- You have the choice between an integrated view of new messages in chronological order from
all mailboxes vs. looking at each separately, like in Mail on OS X, whereas at least with 1.1.4 this is not available on the iPhone (is it in 2.0? I haven't heard anyone mention it). I particularly like that you can even have the BB do a totally integrated chronology of all contact -- so you see e-mails from all accounts, SMS, MMS, missed/dialed/received calls, Blackberry messages, etc, etc, all in one unified reverse chronological list.
- List of little niggles that I'm pretty sure are in 2.0 on the iPhone -- a mark all as read option, keyword searching, other searching tools like finding e-mails from a contact or finding other e-mails from a sender, etc.
Those in any event are all the things I like better on BB than on the iPhone 1.1.4 firmware,
outside of the push issue and corporate connectivity. But, as I said, on the balance, I chose the iPhone primarily because other things about it make it a real joy to use. I loved my BB, and it really was like crack, but the iPhone has a much better knack for making me just grin widely when I use it.
