I think you will be VERY surprised as will a lot of people here when the Bold is released. The BB browser has come a long way and now rivals the iPhone. Of course it wont be as big because the Bold screen is about 2/3 the size of the iPhone's give or take, but the browser is now full HTML as well as the email. The Bold will be a good alternative for people that want the iPhone experience(to a degree), but with the Blackberry business portion, which it sounds like you need.
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iphone 3g vs. Blackberry - help convince me
- Thread starter sbb155
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If the Bold is the phone it promises to be - and I don't doubt it will - it will blow the iPhone out of the water for business use. Those like me who will accept the downgrade on the keyboard for the pretty display will stick with the iPhone, but for heavy emailing and business, Bold will probably win out.
Coming from someone who used to need such a mobile, business device: Apple is new to the "business" game and they're far from figuring it out.
I have owned 4 blackberry devices. Starting with a text-based pager, then a pure PDA, then the 8800 and finally the 8310. I often hear folks state the mail on the BB is better. I always do a double-take when I hear that. Nothing in my opinion could be further from the truth.
The email I get is often someone replying to me with notes. They will often state, I have replied with comments in blue, or highlights, or have an image attached. The iPhone's email is as close to your desktop as can be. Your blackberry email is text, with all the highlights, notes, etc stripped away clean. So you counter that you use Empower. But as I used the add-ons, I know them as well. They are not nearly as good. When I am without my Mac or PC and I get an email, I rest assured I can read as it was intended to be read.
I also strongly advise that the BlackBerry does in no way handle attachments anywhere close to the quality of the iPhone. A PDF, even with 3rd party software doesn't compare at all to the quality of the same PDF attached on the iPhone. I would really like to show the quality of attachments on the iPhone compared to the BlackBerry with or without 3rd party support such as well RepliGo or any other 3rd party attachment viewer. Excel attachments on the iPhone are far far superior. PDFs are a world better.
Email is all about seeing what the sender is sending you. That's what is most important. How then can any BlackBerry user sit here and tell me the BlackBerry is better for email? It's simply not true.
Regarding the keyboard. It took me all of 4 or 5 minutes to get used to the iPhone keyboard. When you type on a BlackBerry keyboard, your thumbs, fingers, whatever you use will cover several keys at once. You have to either use your fingernail, or you are actually thinking about where to focus pressure. Because your finger feels several keys at once. But you focus and depress the one you want. In contrast with the iPhone, you just tap over the area you want and it's done. The physical keyboard act of finding the key, feeling several, and focusing the depression on the selected key becomes an subconscious and muscle memory act over time and you forget all the steps it actually takes to press a key. But the same is true for the iPhone. Once you are used to it, it too becomes a subconscious act. I was one of the people claiming a physical keyboard would always be best. I tried the iPhone several times. But I don't think I was ever serious enough about giving it a shot. Likely for the same reasons other BB users fail to give it a real shot. You see less email at a glance due to the preview of the iPhone, which is needed to make the messages large enough on screen to select the one you want. There are interface difference after all that also have to be considered. That all being said, once you do get used to it, you start to realize what the BlackBerry is actually missing in terms of email quality.
Think of the 3rd party apps and the BlackBerry's limited memory space for actual installed software. This is a major point. You have best 64 and 96 MBs of memory on the BlackBerry for applications. Upgrading the memory on a blackberry does nothing but increase storage for media. It doesn't help you at all in terms of adding add-on software. I have over 40 apps on my iPhone. And I would like to submit the following. Of all the BlackBerry owners I know, they have little actual business software. Most have spell checker, vcard handlers, JiveTalk for IM, and a few silly utilities for the phone itself, such as white list. Few people used something as nice as ToDoMatrix for world-class Getting Things Done. Some have a money manager, or a personal vault for passwords. But....
Look at the iPhone. OmniFocus is by far better than ToDoMatrix. It's $19.95 vs. $59 plus subscription prices for ToDoMatrix. IM on the iPhone is FREE. JiveTalk on the BlackBerry is $34. The one by Shape is $49. These apps are also tied to you BlackBerry hardware ID. Buy a new BlackBerry, and you need to buy most applications over again. Not true on the iPhone. You buy it once, you own it.
BlackBerry owners love to question the business side of the iPhone. We see Oracle, SAP, Act, and SalesForce software for the iPhone already. The quality of these apps is awesome. I in fact have a web app called MintFly which is a $35 a year subscription portal into SalesForce. It only works because of the rich capability of the iPhone.
I love poker. Texas Hold'em Poker on the iphone is a 128MB application. Why? Because it is a desktop quality application. You will not feel like you are playing a mobile version of Texas Holdem. That one app is larger than the entire memory pool for BlackBerry, and I mean ANY blackberry.
How many of you use VNC? At work, I have a Mac that does DVD pre-mastering. It writes DVD ANSI images to DLT tape. And I have a VNC client on it. Check out TelePort on the apps store for the iPhone. I can see the entire Mac monitor on my iPhone as a VNC client. I'm in a meeting and have no time to waste. I can watch the image writing on the Mac while I am in the meeting. I can see the progress, open a keyboard, tell the Mac to connect to a network drive, and move the image to the server. I can connect to a PC and tell the PC to run an Eclipse Image Analysis on the finished image. From my PHONE!!!
Splash Money, several types of eWallets are available, and so on. If you are a Mac user, 1PASSWORD is an iPhone app. It's the best. We have several small and personal database apps to choose from. Seriously, go to any reseller of BlackBerry software and try to find software that is better than that on the iPhone.
The BlackBerry has been around for a very long time. I understand there is a comfort level there. But the iPhone is so clearly the better device. And I didn't mention media capabilities. I focused entire on business. On the consumer side, I can't imagine a BlackBerry owner actually believing the BB bests the iPhone in any way, shape, or form.
In my humble opinion, buying a BlackBerry at this point is a serious mistake. It's so yesterday it may as well be called prehistoric.
Alex Alexzander
The email I get is often someone replying to me with notes. They will often state, I have replied with comments in blue, or highlights, or have an image attached. The iPhone's email is as close to your desktop as can be. Your blackberry email is text, with all the highlights, notes, etc stripped away clean. So you counter that you use Empower. But as I used the add-ons, I know them as well. They are not nearly as good. When I am without my Mac or PC and I get an email, I rest assured I can read as it was intended to be read.
I also strongly advise that the BlackBerry does in no way handle attachments anywhere close to the quality of the iPhone. A PDF, even with 3rd party software doesn't compare at all to the quality of the same PDF attached on the iPhone. I would really like to show the quality of attachments on the iPhone compared to the BlackBerry with or without 3rd party support such as well RepliGo or any other 3rd party attachment viewer. Excel attachments on the iPhone are far far superior. PDFs are a world better.
Email is all about seeing what the sender is sending you. That's what is most important. How then can any BlackBerry user sit here and tell me the BlackBerry is better for email? It's simply not true.
Regarding the keyboard. It took me all of 4 or 5 minutes to get used to the iPhone keyboard. When you type on a BlackBerry keyboard, your thumbs, fingers, whatever you use will cover several keys at once. You have to either use your fingernail, or you are actually thinking about where to focus pressure. Because your finger feels several keys at once. But you focus and depress the one you want. In contrast with the iPhone, you just tap over the area you want and it's done. The physical keyboard act of finding the key, feeling several, and focusing the depression on the selected key becomes an subconscious and muscle memory act over time and you forget all the steps it actually takes to press a key. But the same is true for the iPhone. Once you are used to it, it too becomes a subconscious act. I was one of the people claiming a physical keyboard would always be best. I tried the iPhone several times. But I don't think I was ever serious enough about giving it a shot. Likely for the same reasons other BB users fail to give it a real shot. You see less email at a glance due to the preview of the iPhone, which is needed to make the messages large enough on screen to select the one you want. There are interface difference after all that also have to be considered. That all being said, once you do get used to it, you start to realize what the BlackBerry is actually missing in terms of email quality.
Think of the 3rd party apps and the BlackBerry's limited memory space for actual installed software. This is a major point. You have best 64 and 96 MBs of memory on the BlackBerry for applications. Upgrading the memory on a blackberry does nothing but increase storage for media. It doesn't help you at all in terms of adding add-on software. I have over 40 apps on my iPhone. And I would like to submit the following. Of all the BlackBerry owners I know, they have little actual business software. Most have spell checker, vcard handlers, JiveTalk for IM, and a few silly utilities for the phone itself, such as white list. Few people used something as nice as ToDoMatrix for world-class Getting Things Done. Some have a money manager, or a personal vault for passwords. But....
Look at the iPhone. OmniFocus is by far better than ToDoMatrix. It's $19.95 vs. $59 plus subscription prices for ToDoMatrix. IM on the iPhone is FREE. JiveTalk on the BlackBerry is $34. The one by Shape is $49. These apps are also tied to you BlackBerry hardware ID. Buy a new BlackBerry, and you need to buy most applications over again. Not true on the iPhone. You buy it once, you own it.
BlackBerry owners love to question the business side of the iPhone. We see Oracle, SAP, Act, and SalesForce software for the iPhone already. The quality of these apps is awesome. I in fact have a web app called MintFly which is a $35 a year subscription portal into SalesForce. It only works because of the rich capability of the iPhone.
I love poker. Texas Hold'em Poker on the iphone is a 128MB application. Why? Because it is a desktop quality application. You will not feel like you are playing a mobile version of Texas Holdem. That one app is larger than the entire memory pool for BlackBerry, and I mean ANY blackberry.
How many of you use VNC? At work, I have a Mac that does DVD pre-mastering. It writes DVD ANSI images to DLT tape. And I have a VNC client on it. Check out TelePort on the apps store for the iPhone. I can see the entire Mac monitor on my iPhone as a VNC client. I'm in a meeting and have no time to waste. I can watch the image writing on the Mac while I am in the meeting. I can see the progress, open a keyboard, tell the Mac to connect to a network drive, and move the image to the server. I can connect to a PC and tell the PC to run an Eclipse Image Analysis on the finished image. From my PHONE!!!
Splash Money, several types of eWallets are available, and so on. If you are a Mac user, 1PASSWORD is an iPhone app. It's the best. We have several small and personal database apps to choose from. Seriously, go to any reseller of BlackBerry software and try to find software that is better than that on the iPhone.
The BlackBerry has been around for a very long time. I understand there is a comfort level there. But the iPhone is so clearly the better device. And I didn't mention media capabilities. I focused entire on business. On the consumer side, I can't imagine a BlackBerry owner actually believing the BB bests the iPhone in any way, shape, or form.
In my humble opinion, buying a BlackBerry at this point is a serious mistake. It's so yesterday it may as well be called prehistoric.
Alex Alexzander
I know this is going to sound mean, but it is just my thoughts. The reason reviewers can't type that well on the iPhone is because they're..well...old. I know, I know, they are technology editors, and I have no idea how old you are, but I can tell you as a 20 year old (me), that I adjusted almost immediately to the keyboard. Maybe it's the fact that I grew up with computers, but the older people I see using it just can't hold of the concept of just TRUSTING it.
If you're interested in any speed comparisons, I type about 45 WPM on the iPhone, which is faster than what I typed on my Samsung BlackJack.
That being said, the BB has at least one huge advantage: search. I'd love a system-wide search for my iPhone, and I do expect it to be added soon, but if that's important to you and you need it now then go for the BB.
I agree, and wish to add to this.
How often does a reviewer actually adopt what they are reviewing? I have personally written reviews. And when you do this one things becomes obvious. You just have about a week to use something and then to write about it. They are not coming from the point of view of us. I use my iPhone every day, and have for over 8 months. Believe me, I type as fast as it as I did on the BB. And in fact, when I tried to use a BB recently, I was very conscious of the fact that my fingers feel many more keys than the one I wish to press. The BB became the awkward device.
Think about it. Whatever you are currently used to is going to feel better. You're used to it after all. By that very nature you will be faster on what you are more used to. Given time, you will become more used to the iPhone, and believe me, when it happens, the physical keys will feel awkward. They do for now. I can't stand the physical keys on the BB now.
Alex
That's not an invalid point, but I don't thinks it's that "simple." At 30, I don't consider myself old. To me, the difference is the textile feedback. So long as that is lacking the keyboard will likely continue to be lesser by comparison. So long as I do the vast majority of typing on physical keyboards that is a part of the experience for my fingers. Taking that away, well, it makes for a slightly slower experience.
Granted, for mobile devices it is a shift away from one experience to another, and over time it will become more recognizable, but shifting from textile to purely visible, going from being able to type by feel to having to watch my every keystroke, is just nowhere near as efficient, regardless of my age.
I'm 19 and I hate using the keyboard on the iphone. I had an ipod touch to see if it was worth getting one, and I can't stand it.Sold the touch and went back to a regular clickwheel ipod. I prefer a traditional keyboard. Using my cousins iphone is annoying for that reason.
It is as easy as pie. You and I get it. We can trust the keyboard and just type without complaining when we hit the wrong letter, because the software will automatically correct it and we don't even slow down. Some people are too unintelligent/close-minded/used to previous devices that they can't wrap their head around this issue. There is no reason why anyone should see a significantly lower performance on the iPhone keyboard compared to other small, tactile QWERTY keyboards on phones...
I have owned multiple BB's...currently have a Pearl (through my employer). There are a few things about BB email they are better...the biggest for me is the ability to search your email. I too get a lot of emails a day because I have a lot of folks on my team. Being able to search my email helps a lot. Having said that, I would imagine this will be addressed by Apple in the not too distant future.
Apple is just getting into the business side of things. They went from nothing to something that is a least credible. Give them a little time and they are likely to have something VERY good...maybe even better than RIM.
As it relates to the keyboard, it's not totally cut and dry for me. I can type really well on my iPhone. Just about as well as I could on my "full size" BB when I had one and certainly better than on my Pearl. In any event to each his own.
BTW, if I had to choose one I'd easily go with the iPhone...overall it's a better device for me.
Apple is just getting into the business side of things. They went from nothing to something that is a least credible. Give them a little time and they are likely to have something VERY good...maybe even better than RIM.
As it relates to the keyboard, it's not totally cut and dry for me. I can type really well on my iPhone. Just about as well as I could on my "full size" BB when I had one and certainly better than on my Pearl. In any event to each his own.
BTW, if I had to choose one I'd easily go with the iPhone...overall it's a better device for me.
bluetooth keyboard
I'm waiting for Apple to come out with an OS update that enables bluetooth keyboards. That and the availability of both tactile wallet-sized and folding full-size bluetooth keyboards will really take a huge chunk out the the berry market.
Use the on-screen keyboard for a couple words of email reply. Pull out the micro-keyboard for several sentences. Unfold the full-size keyboard and write a whole book.
I'm waiting for Apple to come out with an OS update that enables bluetooth keyboards. That and the availability of both tactile wallet-sized and folding full-size bluetooth keyboards will really take a huge chunk out the the berry market.
Use the on-screen keyboard for a couple words of email reply. Pull out the micro-keyboard for several sentences. Unfold the full-size keyboard and write a whole book.
1. As you get use to typing on the iPhone you realise why it was difficult at first coming from a BB (like myself)
- pressing vs. slight tapping: if you press as you would on a physical keyboard the surface area of your thumb expands thus the probability of hitting the wrong key increases. Once you get the feel and contact points, you can actually type faster. In my case I'm typing faster on the iPhone (personal) than my BB (work).
- predictive text: it works and if you rely on it, it saves a lot of time!
- characters and symbols: I find it very frustrating on the BB to examine the screen and the keyboard to get the right symbol and characters correct or cycling through using the click wheel. On the iPhone it just displays the keys for you to tap.
2. Viewing attachments on iPhone wins hands down! I'll be upgraded to the BB Bold next week so we'll see how it goes but for now viewing attachments ie. ppt, pdf, doc and xls on the large screen are important to my day-to-day job. Just last night I had an urgent ppt to review/approve while I was out. I had to forward it from my BB to my iPhone via personal email to view the attachment in proper/original form. I got the job done. Although the BB Bold should be able to view important files, I think it's going to be cumbersome (zooming, panning, rotating...), files modified to some extent, not as intuitive as the iPhone and importantly the screen size to view these attachments.
3. Web browsing...no contest. Nothing more to say.
4. User interface...BB is not so simple and things are buried within layers of text and not as simple to navigate in comparison.
5. The BB may be good for outgoing emails. But incoming emails look like alphabet soup to me. The formatting just looks brutal.
After showing how email and attachments look on the iPhone at my workplace and setting the standard where the BB should be, they're more curious now on how it compares and if we made the right choice in getting the BB Bold. We shall see.
For me and from a "business user" point of view, typing is not the deal breaker as you will learn from over time. Both can do emails but I personally think the iPhone is better because of the mail format and interface. But being able to read those attachments clearly and maneuvering around the file on the iPhone is the true winner!
- pressing vs. slight tapping: if you press as you would on a physical keyboard the surface area of your thumb expands thus the probability of hitting the wrong key increases. Once you get the feel and contact points, you can actually type faster. In my case I'm typing faster on the iPhone (personal) than my BB (work).
- predictive text: it works and if you rely on it, it saves a lot of time!
- characters and symbols: I find it very frustrating on the BB to examine the screen and the keyboard to get the right symbol and characters correct or cycling through using the click wheel. On the iPhone it just displays the keys for you to tap.
2. Viewing attachments on iPhone wins hands down! I'll be upgraded to the BB Bold next week so we'll see how it goes but for now viewing attachments ie. ppt, pdf, doc and xls on the large screen are important to my day-to-day job. Just last night I had an urgent ppt to review/approve while I was out. I had to forward it from my BB to my iPhone via personal email to view the attachment in proper/original form. I got the job done. Although the BB Bold should be able to view important files, I think it's going to be cumbersome (zooming, panning, rotating...), files modified to some extent, not as intuitive as the iPhone and importantly the screen size to view these attachments.
3. Web browsing...no contest. Nothing more to say.
4. User interface...BB is not so simple and things are buried within layers of text and not as simple to navigate in comparison.
5. The BB may be good for outgoing emails. But incoming emails look like alphabet soup to me. The formatting just looks brutal.
After showing how email and attachments look on the iPhone at my workplace and setting the standard where the BB should be, they're more curious now on how it compares and if we made the right choice in getting the BB Bold. We shall see.
For me and from a "business user" point of view, typing is not the deal breaker as you will learn from over time. Both can do emails but I personally think the iPhone is better because of the mail format and interface. But being able to read those attachments clearly and maneuvering around the file on the iPhone is the true winner!
I'm coming from a Treo, and I thought I typed fast on that, but I type even faster on my iPhone. And it's learning my words at a nice pace, so I'll be able to type even faster in the future.
I definitely miss cut and paste, though. Of all the flaws, that is at or near the top of my list.
Overall, I'm 100% happy I switched to the iPhone. No contest!
I definitely miss cut and paste, though. Of all the flaws, that is at or near the top of my list.
Overall, I'm 100% happy I switched to the iPhone. No contest!
Typing is a lot easier once you get used to it, i thought the same thing but now that I have my 3G i can text or email like a pro. I am also a 20 year old textaholic college student so that may be a reason but i think its a lot easier than those tiny little buttons on the BB or palm devices.
Simple, if you like typing with actual buttons, go BlackBerry. If you want thinner phone with large widescreen and multi touch, go iPhone.
People claiming that one method of input is objectively better than the other are full of it. It all depends on the person. I hated the physical keyboards on my Treo, BBs, and Tilt. When I got the iTouch, I realized that I type even faster on the virtual keyboard, which made the iPhone a no-brainer. The only thing that slows me down is the annoying auto-complete -- there needs to be a setting to disable this function.
All that said, it sounds like the OP is a BB person, so he/she should probably stick with that.
All that said, it sounds like the OP is a BB person, so he/she should probably stick with that.
And some are close-minded and think everyone must like the same things
Seriously, some of us type a lot of technical terms, which the silly Apple keyboard helper turns into junk, slowing us down.
All Apple has to do is allow turning off the autocorrection. And add copy/paste.
I have no problem using the soft keyboard otherwise. But I have friends who text while in meetings, under the table, without looking, who will never like it.
PS. And it would be nice to have something like the RedFly companion keyboard and large display... or at least a way to remotely type/display using a desktop.
I do. I went from a WM Treo to the iphone. While I can type faster on the iphone, I have many problems with it.
lack of cut and paste
no highlighting
poor implementation of autocorrect
cannot easily move around the text you've already written
doesn't move btwn different email accounts quickly
cannot have different signatures for different email accnts
cannot search
probably lots of others I'm not thinking of right now.
I like my iPhone, but it probably does 1/10th of things I could do with WM, many of which I find a real problem. It's not a real business phone, imho, and if it weren't for mobile me keeping my wife's and my calendars and contacts in check, I'd dump it.
The media experience is very good on it.
whatever I just got one yesterday
quality is shockingly perfect as we expect couple of returns to get a decent one from apple.1/10!?!?!?! I would advise anybody with any consumer product that felt it was a 1/10th as effective as an alternative to go with the alternative. MobileMe is THAT good??? And can't you have MobileMe without having an iPhone? (question not a statement) If I felt that way I would run not walk back to my WM device that is so so superior.
In a way I'm a great candidate for this discussion: I don't own an iPhone but really want one, and my parents own a BlackBerry Curve on Verizon so I use it pretty often... well, as often as they let me. So this is from the perspective of someone who has not typed on either phone and is starting fresh.
The Curve is a sweet phone, and the keys are awesome. But they are really small and when I tried typing fast going straight into it, I made some mistakes. Also, I am so not used to the "alt" key and going back and fixing my errors that it sometimes becomes annoying.
The iPhone keyboard was a bit more complicated at first, but didn't have any of the "learning" required that the BlackBerry did. I think that if I used a BlackBerry and an iPhone equally, every day, since I began using both around the same time, I would become more proficient at using an iPhone than a BlackBerry. Your experience using a BlackBerry overshadows this however and it may not be worth it for you to try something else.
Also, the Curve (at least on Verizon) doesn't really have that many cool features, and the web browser is annoying. And when on a call, it is non-intuitive when trying to do things like change the volume and find contacts (although it was on another BlackBerry I used, again showing my inexperience with the Curve).
If I were you I'd go to an Apple store and just keep composing random emails or texts or anything and see how it feels for you.
The Curve is a sweet phone, and the keys are awesome. But they are really small and when I tried typing fast going straight into it, I made some mistakes. Also, I am so not used to the "alt" key and going back and fixing my errors that it sometimes becomes annoying.
The iPhone keyboard was a bit more complicated at first, but didn't have any of the "learning" required that the BlackBerry did. I think that if I used a BlackBerry and an iPhone equally, every day, since I began using both around the same time, I would become more proficient at using an iPhone than a BlackBerry. Your experience using a BlackBerry overshadows this however and it may not be worth it for you to try something else.
Also, the Curve (at least on Verizon) doesn't really have that many cool features, and the web browser is annoying. And when on a call, it is non-intuitive when trying to do things like change the volume and find contacts (although it was on another BlackBerry I used, again showing my inexperience with the Curve).
If I were you I'd go to an Apple store and just keep composing random emails or texts or anything and see how it feels for you.
All i have to say is that the biggest company in the world (HSBC) is about to switch over from all BlackBerry to all iPhone
Rest is up to you
Rest is up to you