Comparison of the iPhone and the Blackberry by a diehard Mac fan

January 15th, 2009  |  Darrell Corriveau

I have been a long time user of the Blackberry and have been generally happy with the product. Being a long time Mac user as well, I have been interested in the iPhone from afar since its launch. My children both have iPod Touches so I have played with the interface, and some of the Apps, but my blackberry has never really done me wrong so I didn’t have a great urge to make a switch.

Well, early last week my Blackberry died. Half of the keyboard didn’t work, nor did the trackball. Bell store employees informed me that with the backlog of orders for Blackberries it may be quite some time before I got a replacement. I was not happy with this, so I took the opportunity to make the leap and sign up for a new iPhone 3G with Rogers.

Well, it has been almost a week I have had my iPhone, and I have to admit, somewhat sadly being a Mac devotee, that it does not compare at all to the usability of my old blackberry. Sure it is a great little product and has some definite benefits over the blackberry including:

1. Easily syncs with the Mac. This is one major shortfall for RIM. Why they won’t support the Mac better has always confused me.
2. Very slick and consistent in the interface. As is always the case with Mac products, the interface for most Apps have common elements and functions that make them very easy to learn.
3. Browser is awesome. It would be nice to have Flash integration, but aside from that, the experience of web browsing on the iPhone is very close to doing so on a desktop. My Blackberry’s (the 8830 World Edition) browser is little more than a text browser, but as a lot of sites offer “m.” mobile sites it can be surprisingly useful.
4. iTunes integration. I have a flash memory card in my Blackberry that allows me to load media files which is great, but I can’t listen to DRM music that I bought from iTunes, and I have bought a lot lately.
5. WiFi support. I can’t benefit from local Wifi on my Blackberry so I end up getting a lot more usage over the cell network ($).
6. General niftiness. People crowd around to see my iPhone. I am lonely when I use my Blackberry.

Now with all of those points you would think that my preference leans in favour of the almighty iPhone, right? Wrong! And here is the reason…

95% of what I use my mobile device for is text and email messaging.

The iPhone lacks in almost every respect when it comes to those important tasks. Consider the following:

1. Quick scanning. On the iPhone the maximum number of email messages I can see the titles of on the main email screen at one time is 5. Granted they are very legible, but compare that to 9 on the Blackberry. It is very important to me to be able to see new messages quickly.
2. External visual notification. There is no new message external indicator on the iPhone. When I get a new message or notification on my Blackberry, the little red light blinks to tell me, even if I missed the initial notification.
3. Push in action. I may be wrong about this (at least I can’t figure it out yet) but it seems to me that push email on the iPhone is not as immediate as it is on the Blackberry. I send an email to my blackberry and seconds later it vibrates. Not so with my iPhone. Sometimes it does, and other times I get no notification until I open up the mail app and new emails come streaming in. Feel free to correct me if your experience differs from mine. Perhaps you need Mobile Me?
4. Alarm clock effectiveness. In order to use my iPhone as an alarm clock (which I do all the time with my Blackberry) I have to enter into “Airplane Mode” which is within the settings, otherwise the device stays on, and I will get notifications of all events throughout the night. My Blackberry will sleep (no notifications) and awake at the time I set the alarm for, without having to make numerous setting changes every time.
5. Batch marking. On the iPhone you can not mark multiple email messages as read. This is a huge deficiency for me. In order to mark emails as read you have to view every single one individually, and the same goes for deleting them. Not so on the Blackberry. Try doing that for over 300 emails a day that you also get on your desktop.
6. Keyboard usability. Don’t get me started. The usability of the screen keyboard on the iPhone has been discussed by many others. Suffice it to say I can type about twice as fast on my full keyboard Blackberry.

Okay, so here endeth the rant. The short story is that I am going to return my iPhone and stick with my new replacement Blackberry (which showed up two days after Bell told me it would be weeks). Most of the points above (barring the red light indicator) can probably be fixed in later operating system updates for the iPhone, but for now, I’ll regard it as a very cool device and great toy, but not ready for the mass business market. I’m off to pick up an iPod Touch!