I am now a reverse switcher--I switched from a BlackBerry to an iPhone about six months ago, and now am switching back again. Why? Basically it comes down to the fact that the iPhone is really good at the stuff I do 10 percent of the time, but pretty poor at the stuff I do 90 percent of the time.
This is not to bash the iPhone. It has been a transformative device in the wireless industry and forced everyone else to up their game. It has shuffled the power structure among device makers, service providers, developers, and the broader ecosystem. But such a sophisticated device is a very personal choice, and people have very different priorities for something they use and carry around with them almost every waking hour. My phone is provided by and for work, and I primarily use it for work purposes, and for that I find a BlackBerry much, much more efficient.
Now after having a BlackBerry Bold for a week, I realize how much I was fighting with the iPhone the whole time trying to get it to do what I wanted, at the speed I wanted.
iPhone upsides
There are definitely some things the iPhone does extremely well:
- Maps: The best out there. Invaluable for me, and I'll miss these, though the latest rev of Google Maps on the Bold does all the same things. It just misses that last bit of visual flair.
- OmniFocus: I'm not really a big app buyer, but this GTD-based task manager is the one app that I use every day. I will lose it on the Bold, and I will miss it. (I'll continue to use it on my Mac.)
- Photos: I love how conveniently I'm able to synch my Aperture photo library with the iPhone, and the experience of showing photos on the screen. It's not something I do that often, but it is very handy when I want it. (I'm mystified why it's relatively laborious to get photos off the iPhone and into Aperture, though, requiring a manual import process as though it were any other SD card.) The imminent Desktop Manager for the BlackBerry promises similar photo (and music) syncing.
- Facebook: The iPhone Facebook app is mostly very good (though often hard to get a refresh), and the new version looks to be even better. But the current FB app on the Bold works very well, is actually faster than the iPhone one, does everything I need, and I find more intuitive to navigate.
- Safari: It's the best mobile browser, and while it has its downsides in general it works very well. But I don't do much mobile Web browsing, it's just not that much fun--still slow and inconvenient, and only worthwhile when there's nothing else to do or you're in a pinch. In truth, it's often more pleasant to look at mobile-specific versions of Web sites like NY Times and Southwest, than it is to try and look at the real page. They load faster, require less scrolling, strip out the advertising, etc. In fact, looking at NY Times mobile is faster than using the NY Times iPhone app (though it doesn't allow caching, but I was never organized enough to cache ahead of time anyway).
