Today's New York Times features an article in the business section about what RIM is doing to fend off Apple in the battle for mobile phone market share between the iPhone and the Blackberry. It is interesting timing for me, since last week I just got a new 8000 series Blackberry as my new work phone. I thought it may be useful to compare the new Blackberry to my iPhone that I bought in early March for my birthday.
Blackberries are all about business and all about e-mail, and predictably, that is where my new phone excels. Until the new iPhone software comes out in June with full Exchange support, there is no comparison between how I access my work e-mail with my iPhone vs. the Blackberry. The one glitch with the Blackberry is that it doesn't just work out of the box like I would expect it to. I get my e-mail faster through the Blackberry than I do with Outlook when I am sitting at my computer at work, but when the e-mail includes an attachment then I can't open the attachment. I need to consult the manual and I expect I will have to add some software from the CD that came with the Blackberry to get it to work properly with attachments. Meanwhile, attachments that are .doc files or PDFs open without any additional intervention on the iPhone when I access my Exchange account using Outlook Web Access. So, out of the box, the Blackberry wins for e-mail without attachments, but it is a mixed bag with attachments.
So, what other things do I regularly do on my phone? Well, thanks to the ubiquitous Internet access with the iPhone and the Treo 650 that I was using before the iPhone, I am used to hopping onto the Web to check bus schedules, check the weather forecast, check my RSS feeds, etc. And this became an even better experience with the iPhone because the Web looked like the real Web, rather than some truncated, barely functional version on the Treo. And then I tried looking at the Web with the Blackberry. I nearly choked when I viewed my local eating blog Eat Local - Washington on the Blackberry. On the iPhone is looks like the page I am fiddling with in Tinderbox. On the Blackberry it looks like the Web from 1995, when Mosaic first brought access to graphics to the masses on the Web. It looks like shit.
There are other features I could compare between the iPhone and the Blackberry, like watching videos and listening to music, but I will never do those things on the Blackberry since it is my work phone. The iPhone is my life phone, and as such, things that really matter like personal photos, music, videos. When applications come to the iPhone through official means in June, the iPhone will become an even bigger part of my regular life, with an iPhone version of OmniFocus and other applications living on the iPhone as well as on my MacBook Pro.
Other quirks with the Blackberry:
It doesn't charge reliably unless I use the supplied plug-in charger. Although the Blackberry has a cord that appears it would make it possible to charge from a USB port, it gives me a warning that I need to install drivers to charge with the cord on my work laptop and it just tells me it won't charge at all when plugged into my MacBook Pro.
There isn't any WiFi in this model of the Blackberry. I lived without WiFi on the Treo 650 as well, so this isn't a huge adjustment with the Blackberry, but it makes the phone seem less than current without WiFi.
The tiny screen on the Blackberry is hard to get used to when compared to using an iPhone. I really think that the iPhone could be a little bigger with an even larger screen if it were to be a really workable road computer, but at least the iPhone gives me screen real estate. It is painful looking at the Web on the Blackberry, not only because the built in browser does a crappy job rendering pages as they really look on the Web, but also because it is rendering the pages on a crappy screen.
My conclusion is predictable. The Blackberry works well for what it does best, dealing with e-mail in a work setting. But its lead over the iPhone in this arena is tenous, and from the brief experience of this new Blackberry user, the overall Blackberry user experience pales in comparison to using an iPhone. If you absolutely need a clunky, mechanical keyboard on your phone, as I know many users do, then the Blackberry is for you. If you are willing to learn how to work with the iPhone, you may find the overall experience much more rewarding than what you can experience with the Blackberry.
Jeff Carlson offered his thoughts about his first 11 months or so of using the iPhone in yesterday's Seattle Times. I echo his assessment - the iPhone is a keeper for a life device. The Blackberry is passable as a work-only device.
