The Hare and the Tortoise

I’m currently a BlackBerry guy with 2 generations of them under my belt. It’s getting close to time to upgrade phones and the dilemma is BlackBerry or iPhone? Unfortunately, BlackBerry has gotten behind on its operating system and Apple and the Android phones have been eating BlackBerry’s lunch. I have had the chance to use my wife’s iPhone 3GS and evaluate it against my BlackBerry. Some winners and losers from my admittedly subjective viewpoint:

Battery Life (BB) BB routinely gets 2+ days while the IP has to hit the juice every night. BB batteries are available everywhere for $20-$30 and can easily be installed by the owner. IPs must be sent to the factory or go to an Apple store to change the battery.

E-mail  (BB) BB keeps e-mails until you delete them. You can also save individual e-mails to a separate folder that will save them indefinitely and is easily accessed. E-mail is also pushed regularly to your phone through the BB server.

Voice  (BB)  BB is generally reported to have better call quality which is probably attributable to a better antenna.

Keyboard  (BB) This is more of a personal preference. The BB physical keyboard is easier for me to use, especially for texting. The IP electronic keyboard isn’t bad but due to its small size, my fat fingers tend to slop over on to other keys.

Calendar  (BB)  The options available on the BB calendar are much more numerous and easy to use than IP. One-hand operation doesn’t hurt either.

Message Notifiers  (BB) This one is debatable. BBs have an LED message indicator at the top of the phone that can use different colors depending on the type of message received. In a meeting you can use this feature to screen for important messages/texts. There are also a lot of free custom tones available for message tones and ring tones.

Internet  (IP)  No one else is close to the IP for internet usage. Navigation is especially good.

Multimedia (IP) Music and photos are killer in the IP - quick, smooth, and easy to use.

Data Usage  (BB) In this new era of data caps, BB uses a data compression technology which uses less bandwidth to get the same amount of data to your phone. This might be significant to a heavy user, which I am not.

Conclusion: BB is a nice phone, but it is behind the times. The new iOS 5 operating system is due out any day, as is the iPhone 5, so we will need to see how these address some of the issues raised above. If it does, then…