This is my experience trying to switch from a Blackberry to an iPhone. These types of blog posts get more traffic than my boring email security posts, so if you found this via some search engine please take a look at messagepartners.com to learn about our email security and archival solutions.
I have been a blackberry addict for about 3 years but I have become frustrated with certain problems with the service. For one, Blackberry can’t read HTML emails and it seems that more and more business critical emails are in html format. They show up as a jumbled mess on the bb screen. I was using full keyboard bb’s for years and switched to a pearl for the small size and integrated camera. However, the keyboard starting giving me fits and my emails were writhe with spelling errors. It got to the point where I just stopped replying to complicated emails because they were filled with embarrassing errors. Furthermore, I use qmail as my email server along with cyrus IMAP and there is no good sync method that I found. I ended up forwarding email to the bb but this is sub-optimal and can lead to loops if a huge email fills the bb mailbox as a mail/rejection loop can begin. Other than these things, the utility of the BB was great, though I became hugely addicted to checking email. It became an obsession and a real drag on the concentration span.
So last week a business partner offered me a free iPhone and I jumped at the chance to try it out. After about 10 days I can say that while it has GREAT hype and looks super cool, however, it does not fit my needs and I am switching back to my BB. I will leave the iPhone around my apartment for web browsing via wifi and a small ipod, but it fell short for my business needs. Here’s why:
1) No cut and paste. Mandatory for my line of work and BB has it down real well.
2) Security is a problem with SMS’s as they automatically pop up on your screen. Beware if you let someone use your phone because they can see your text messages easily without any user actions. This can be quite embarrassing. There is a way to stop that behavior by locking the phone, but then every access of the phone requires 4 commands, which gets annoying.
3) The ipod/phone integration is the coolest thing, but getting to the iPod controls to stop or start music or skip songs manually is cumbersome. It takes at least 3 or 4 key strokes from most places since there is not start/stop button.
4) On the plus side the iPhone is much better at reading html emails and you can reply to messages in-line. BB’s force you to top-post, or put your replies at the top of messages. It is hard to reply to long messages on the bb because of this.
5) The iPhone is totally locked and the bb feels more open. My friends unlocked their iphones and it seems a lot cooler in that mode, but I opted to keep it locked. The only entry point is from iTunes and that can be very weird since you can’t drag and drop songs or photos onto the iPhone
6) Wifi is great for browsing, but the browser has no java or flash, hence, many sites don’t display or even worse, safari will just quit and puke on a page it can’t read.
7) I could not send outbound emails on wifi in many places because cablevision, my provider, requires me to use their outbound smtp server for sending. If i wanted to send on wifi i had to change my account setup each time to use their outbound server but this is cumbersome. Even worse, if I send an email on wifi and I forgot to change my outbound settings the email was lost for a few minutes. It did not show up in my outbox for at least 2 minutes and there was no way to interrupt the sending and resend. The email seemed to be in some sort of lala land and was missing. As a result a few key emails were not sent in a timely fashion because I forgot to babysit the iPhone.
Battery sucks and sucks badly. I don’t care about the hype, it sucks. If you have blue tooth and wifi, you get 1 hour TOPS.
9) Apple bluetooth is really bad. Battery is much worse than any other I have use, it constantly fell out of my ear, it only charged in their proprietary charger and it was very expensive, about $100.
10) Iphone is really cool looking and everyone wants to play with it, but it is also my work and I wanted it somewhat private. I felt like a spoiled kid that wouldn’t let anyone play with my toy. My kids went nuts for it and that also creates privacy issues. Blackberry is boring as can be, which is fine for business stuff.
11) No MMS support. That really sucked because I kept getting mms messages with pictures that I couldn’t view. ATT replaces the pictures with links to viewmymessage.com or something, but since you can’t copy and paste their cryptic filenames and pw’s i never saw a single picture that was sent to me. Furthermore, when i was at a computer and tried the links with correct file id’s and pw’s not a SINGLE combination worked.
12) No integrated search in iphone. There are some webapps but why leave this out? It is lame.
13) No way to mass delete email. Blackberry has delete all prior email, iphone does not.
14) Email is not downloaded to iphone, only message stubs. Full email is downloaded when viewing, but that sucks because i don’t always have network coverage so I can’t always read my email. BB downloads full message text but not attachments, they are downloaded on demand.
So my vote? IPhone is great for reading the internet on the can or showing to your kids and neighbors, but I found it cumbersome, poorly designed and not suited for business use.
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