IPhone verus Blackberry Pearl

Recently, I was given the opportunity to use an IPhone for a week to see if I liked it.  As an avowed Blackberry addict, I was thinking initially that the IPhone was not going to work well for me due to the fact that it had no physical keyboard.  I was wrong.

I received the IPhone on Tuesday morning, charged it and put my SIM card in.  It recognized all my contacts, and I was able to browse the web using 3G speeds.  Excellent start, don’t you think?

My previous Blackberry was a Pearl, which uses EDGE for data.  Not necessarily slow, but compared to 3G, not fast.  I was pleased with the speed of the web browsing, and I was pleased with the rendering of web pages that I would normally go do during a regular day.

I was able to get my email set up for both work and home.  I was able to send and receive email from both, so I was pretty happy.

The on screen keyboard, which I really felt was going to be a huge deterrent to the usage of the phone was a big detraction.  It slowed me down quite a bit.  But I was able to work around it successfully, but I was not as productive with it as I was on my regular hard keyboard based BlackBerry Pearl.

The ITunes store is really useful for both applications and music.  I liked the fact that I was able to get a Facebook client, a Twitter client and a couple other clients easily downloaded and installed on the IPhone.  They worked really really well.

I was hoping that I could replace my IPod, my phone and use the Kindle application to read books.  The Kindle application is top notch and well worth the price of admission.

Now the cons, at least in my experience:

• The on screen keyboard.  While it was OK once you got used to it, a heavy email/text message user is going to have difficulty being as productive as they would be with a physical keyboard.
• Email notification.  With the Blackberry, one of the beautiful things is that I get notified of emails without having to go into the physical MAIL application portion of the phone.  In my line of work, this is essential.  With the IPhone, I was never able to get it to work so that if I was in another application, I would get alerts for new email and new text messages and without actually being in the Mail portion of the phone.
• THE BATTERY LIFE IS ABYSMAL.  AT BEST.  I could only get about five hours of usage out of the battery before I would get a 10% warning and have to charge it.  It is possible that I got a bad battery, but wow, after normal usage, the battery life is really really bad.  I couldn’t even get through a normal day with one charge.
• I couldn’t add music to it from more than one machine.  With my IPod, I can add music from more than one machine.  But with the IPhone, I am told that I have to blow everything away and start from scratch.  Not a good thing.

So I’m back to the Pearl. I’ll revist the situation in August, possibly going with the Bold at that point.

Technorati Tags: Blackberry,IPhone,Mobile Phones,Digital Nomad